On Tue, 9 Jun 2026 at 11:10, Gerd Hoffmann <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > With firmware qemu exposes kernel + initrd (and with this patch shim > > > too) via fw_cfg, and the firmware can pick it up from there and run > > > it (instead of trying to boot via disk / cdrom / network). > > > > I don't really think of the latter as being direct-boot, and > > nor does our documentation: > > > # - specify a firmware and pass a hint to the kernel to boot > > # - direct kernel image boot > > That is a technical detail which doesn't make much of a difference > from the end user perspective. And often people talk about "direct > kernel boot" without drawing a line between these two cases, because the > user-visible behavior is pretty much identical: You pass a kernel to > qemu via '-kernel', and it gets booted ...
As an end user I find them majorly different -- I usually don't want the firmware, because it takes forever to boot if you do that. This is probably partly an x86 vs Arm difference: for x86 there is always some kind of BIOS booted, but for Arm there by default is not, and direct kernel boot is much more common. thanks -- PMM
