LiveCD qemu autoplay?

[Andrew Jorgensen]

On 2/9/06, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 02:22:53PM -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
> > What would it take to launch the LiveCD in qemu on Windows?
> >
> > In linux you could just point qemu at the cdrom device with "qemu
> > -cdrom /dev/cdrom" but that's not possible in Windows (yet?).  It
> > seems, though, that it should be possible to boot up the casper image
> > using qemu and run it that way.  Has anyone tried this?  Should it be
> > possible?  Perhaps if an extra bootstrap image were also provided on
> > the CD?
> >
> > It seems to me this could really make the LiveCD easier to try,
> > particularly if the user feels unwilling to trust his machine to the
> > CD at first.  Or if he simply hates rebooting, like I do.
>
> I like this idea.  We could include a Windows qemu executable on the live CD
> and allow it to be easily launched.  However, if qemu doesn't yet provide a
> way to access data on the host CD-ROM drive, I don't see how we can make it
> work.

Since I asked I've been trying to make it work.  I'm having some
trouble getting the kernel commandline working correctly but qemu has
-kernel -initrd and -append parameters for loading linux kernels.  I
can load the kernel in the install directory of the CD and I can use
the cloop image as my HDD but I don't understand casper well enough to
pass the right -append options to make it boot.

Even better than booting the image, though, might be having a saved vm
state (qemu -loadvm) so that it comes right up into an already booted
system.  That would be almost instant and there would be no need to
configure the hardware because qemu always has the same hardware. 
There might be a reason to configure the language...

It seems likely that someone who understands casper well enough would
be able to boot the current LiveCD from the cloop and the
kernel+initrd without adding anything to the image or accessing the CD
directly.