For the moment, the virt machine can only be started by using QEMU "-kernel" parameter, and thus can only load the kernel/initramfs from the host filesystem.
Adding a firmware is a good way to allow the machine to boot and update a kernel from the guest point of view (disk, network, cdrom, ...). As I don't want to port a firmware to this machine, the easy way to do that is to use linux. This approach is already in use by petit boot on the bare metal POWER systems. This series adds a bootstrap ROM to load the firmware (petit boot), and a buildroot environment to build the petit boot firmware for the m68k virt machine. To build the bootstram ROM: $ git submodule init roms/m68k-virt $ git submodule updage roms/m68k-virt $ make -C roms m68k-virt-bootrom To build the firmware: $ git submodule init roms/buildroot $ git submodule update roms/buildroot $ make -C roms m68k-virt-firmware Build qemu-system-m68k and then you can start QEMU and play with petit boot: $ ./qemu-system-m68k -M virt -nographic Petit boot supports various bootloader configuration files, like grub, pxe, kboot, syslinux... For instance: menuentry "Linux 5.16.0-virt (debian 10.0)" { search --set=root --label root linux /boot/vmlinux-5.16.0-virt ro root=/dev/vda2 console=ttyGF0 } default="vmlinux-5.16.0-virt" vmlinux-5.16.0-virt='/boot/vmlinux-5.16.0-virt root=/dev/vda2 console=ttyGF0' default vmlinux-5.16.0-virt (debian 10.0) label vmlinux-5.16.0-virt (debian 10.0) kernel /boot/vmlinux-5.16.0-virt append root=/dev/vda2 console=ttyGF0 Laurent Vivier (3): m68k: bootinfo entry size must be aligned on 4 bytes m68k: virt: add a bootstrap ROM m68k: virt: add a firmware (petitboot) configure | 3 +- hw/m68k/bootinfo.h | 4 +- include/hw/misc/virt_ctrl.h | 6 ++ hw/m68k/virt.c | 38 ++++++++++++ hw/misc/virt_ctrl.c | 111 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- .gitmodules | 6 ++ pc-bios/meson.build | 3 + roms/Makefile | 15 +++++ roms/buildroot | 1 + roms/m68k-virt | 1 + 10 files changed, 183 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) create mode 160000 roms/buildroot create mode 160000 roms/m68k-virt -- 2.34.1