Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI
by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @06:36PM
(#45662615)
Does qemu make an effort to preserve backwards compatibility with its cli? Because I have distinct memories of getting caught by them changing the way multiple parts of their command line work.
But in this case, my suggestions should be fairly backwards compatible; retaining the default of BIOS but adding a simple `--firmware uefi` option would change nothing for existing users, and even defaulting to `--firmware uefi,bios` should be mostly compatible since it just tries UEFI and then promptly falls back to BIOS.
Pretty sure they do, but I agree that adding `--firmware uefi` would be fine.
Yeah, we do try to maintain at least some back compat. Some things go through a deprecate-and-drop cycle, but that is more often driven by "the old thing is a pain to maintain internally" than by "the new thing is more user friendly".
New top level command line options are rare these days, and magic "do what I mean" options also rare: we tend to prefer "tell us specifically what you want".
The approach the project has settled on is to say that providing user friendly defaults should be the job of a "management layer" piece of software like libvirt, and QEMU proper should concentrate on providing flexible and orthogonal options which that other software can use to tell it what to do.