Hmm... I second that note about forcing a particuar HAL using F5 during XP installer, just before F6 for the driver floppy.
Note that you probably do not need to disable ACPI in QEMU (the hypervisor). By selecting a non-ACPI HAL during XP installation, you should end up not using ACPI in the guest, even if available from the host/SeaBIOS. It seems that indeed the SeaBIOS supports the MPS tables. This is an extension to the APM standard PC, allowing for multiple CPU cores *and IO-APIC IRQ's*, without having to resort to ACPI. So, the XP HAL of my choice would be "MPS multiprocessor PC". Forcing this MPS HAL by pressing F5 during XP installation, is actually one way of achieving multi-processor and APIC-enabled install of WinXP on the BayTrail platform, whose ACPI is too new for XP. I guess I've heard someone suggest that it was possible to change the HAL in a finished/live install of WinXP. Similar to updating a driver for a peripheral controller. You need the installed image of WinXP to be live = you need to do this still in the original VM (VMware). Should be easy to try in a VM, on a disposable snapshot of the golden master XP image :-) One more note regarding storage controller drivers: QEMU-KVM offers several emulated options: IDE, some legacy SCSI controllers, and the generally preferred modern model is VirtIO. To the guest, the VirtIO storage controller appears as a SCSI HBA on PCI, needs a dedicated driver. Apparently, the Virtio F6 Floppy for XP is no longer easy to find. There's a link to some "web archive" in one of the websites I will refer to below. https://forums.unraid.net/topic/91542-solved-windows-xp-help/ https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/viostor/installatio n I recall that XP had a problem getting installed on bare metal Intel AHCI controllers, even using Intel's official F6 Floppy for the hardware and XP. The same chipset configured for IDE mode would work fine. In qemu, I guess AHCI is a non-issue. IIRC. Frank From: nick wells <nwell...@gmail.com> To: "qemu-discuss@nongnu.org" <qemu-discuss@nongnu.org> Subject: Re: Windows XP support Date sent: Wed, 11 Sep 2024 16:23:21 +0000 > > Recently, I have been able to install XP as a guest within qemu using > Q35 machine by turning off ACPI in machine type settings and manually > selecting "Standard PC" HAL type after pressing F5 during XP setup. > ACPI can work with the MPS uni-processor and multi-processor HAL Types > if ACPI is needed. You can also press F7 during setup to bypass > HAL/ACPI selection entirely. This works for windows 2k guests as well.
