I use real CD-ROM disc in Mac OS and Windows guests on my Mac OS 10.12 host. I have to run QEMU in root mode using the sudo command in order to access the CD-ROM drive. So I know QEMU's support for using real optical media on Mac OS hosts does work.
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/588691 Title: QEMU is not correctly detecting host CDs Status in QEMU: Incomplete Bug description: QEMU's block layer contains code for detecting and using ioctls when real CD-ROM host devices are attached. This detection is not working in some host OSes while bad implemented on anothers. E.g., in Linux host qemu -cdrom /dev/sr0 is not detecting it as a CD-ROM E.g., in Mac OS X host qemu asks the kernel to enumerate optical devices and the compares it to the constant string "/dev/cdrom". This is useless, that enumeration is just enough, and "/dev/cdrom" will NEVER exist in Mac OS X unless manually created by the user. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/588691/+subscriptions