Hi, > What I'd like to avoid is casual users setting up new guests with our > shiny new q35 board getting their IDE drives connected to some slow, old > controller just because they haven't discovered that if=ide doesn't cut > it anymore, and they need to use if=ahci now.
That will not work. ahci has no such thing as master/slave. Each ahci port (modeled as ide bus in qemu for ata emulation code reuse reasons) accepts one drive only. Thus -drive if=ide,bus=x,unit=1,file=... will not work with ahci. cheers, Gerd