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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.

Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by kragen on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @07:16PM (#45662998)
Pretty sure they do, but I agree that adding `--firmware uefi` would be fine.
Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by pm215 on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @03:29PM (#45673997)
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".

Re:Ilo – a Forth system running on UEFI by kragen on Friday October 24, 2025 @12:21AM (#45690741)
Thank you for explaining! I had had the impression that QEMU was pretty fanatical about backward compatibility.