How to mount a virtual floppy disk into a virtual machine?

Question

I'm using qemu-system-x86_64 to start a virtual machine, but I absolutely can't figure out how to mount a virtual floppy disk (vfd file) into it.

If I want to mount an iso, that is easy:

-drive "file=/path/to/iso/file.iso,index=1,media=cdrom"

If I want to mount a drive, that is easy as well:

-drive id=disk0,if=virtio,cache.direct=on,if=virtio,aio=native,format=raw,file=/path/to/drive/image

I even managed to find out how I could mount a physical drive:

-drive file=/path/to/drive,if=virtio

But I couldn't find a single example on how to mount a vfd.

Answer 1

The short way:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -fda /path/to/floppy.img

I've heard of QEMU command-line options similar to this one described as "convenience flags".

The long way:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -drive file=/path/to/floppy.img,index=0,if=floppy,format=raw

This option is apparently deprecated.

The "modern" way:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -blockdev driver=file,node-name=f0,filename=/path/to/floppy.img -device floppy,drive=f0

Note that devices attached this way tend not to cooperate well with older QEMU functionality such as the -snapshot flag and the monitor command change.

On-the-fly:

(qemu) change floppy0 /path/to/floppy.img

This is a monitor command for managing removable media after the emulator has already started. info block will print the name of the floppy device if its name isn't "floppy0".

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Other (?) ways:

Peruse the online manual and in-tree docs for more ideas. QMP could probably attach floppy images dynamically, but I'm not familiar with it.