Re: Running NetBSD installer on VM to install on real disk [Was: NetBSD 9.3 UEFI...]

[Andreas Gustafsson <gson%gson.org@localhost>]

Mr Roooster wrote:
> It does seem to be possible to boot QEMU off the host disk under Linux
> (by pointing it at the block device rather than a partition), but you
> could really set yourself up for problems. (Qemu writing to the wrong
> bit of your disk may end badly. :D )

And all but the most recent versions of qemu really do have a nasty
habit of accessing the wrong part of the disk when running NetBSD
guests, because of a bug that was finally fixed in this commit:

  https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/46e018e9b741731842b93ce23a86fad60445969b

This has bitten me several times when booting NetBSD in qemu directly
from a physical disk.  The bug is not actually specific to physical
disks - it affects any disk of size >= 128 GiB, but in practice it
tends to hit physical disks because they are more likely to be of that
size.
-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, gson%gson.org@localhost