Does Qemu have a way to present to the VM a disk drive that is simulated from a set of files which hold the images of the partitions? The standard -drive option requires that a disk image be in one host file, so all the partitions have to be assembled together.
(And is this useful, or is it simpler to have each partition be in a one-partition disk drive?) -- this may or may not be related -- The documentation (file:///usr/share/doc/qemu/qemu-doc.html) describes how to set up a "fd set" but it tells nothing about what an fd set is or does. Thanks, Dale