About usage of floppy with linux guests on gnome-boxes

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lmr redhat com>]

Hi,

I maintain the test framework used on KVM [1][2], and we have an 
internal farm that runs regression tests on qemu, qemu-kvm and other KVM 
branches, so we are pretty up to date as for the latest issues found on 
those qemu branches :) We for example, were the first to report the 
recent qemu floppy regression to upstream. We have a good deal of code 
that automates and tests KVM, including installing a vast array of guest 
OS on an unattended way.

Now, interested as I am in the boxes project, checked out the code, and 
noticed that you guys are using floppy to do unattended install even on 
Linux. The problem with that is not related to qemu itself, but rather 
with the fact that the Linux on guests using floppy is pretty unstable. 
We have over a year of test results suggesting that it's ideal to avoid 
using the floppy hardware on Linux guests, since that can cause them to 
kernel panic. Granted, it's not reproducible 100% of the time, but I'd 
say a good 10% of the time floppy is being used, specially with -smp 2 
guests, a kernel panic will happen, flooding the maintainers with bug 
reports, and it'd probably take a while for you guys to figure out what 
is going on.

We've seen this with Fedora, OpenSUSE and RHEL so far, what made us to 
rewrite our unattended install code to use:

1) unattended cdrom + xml file for OpenSUSE/SUSE
2) unattended cdrom + kickstart file for Fedora/RHEL
3) initrd preseed (put a preseed file on initrd) for Ubuntu/Debian

Windows guests do not present such problems, it's fine to use floppy for 
them (in fact, it's the best option since we can avoid re-mastering the 
windows cd).

So I'd like to implement unattended cdrom creation for gnome boxes, but 
I'm still making my way on vala *and* how to build it, so I can test my 
changes. I assume jhbuild is my best bet, or is there a shortcut that I 
can use (ie, installing packages foo, bar, baz and then I can build it)?

Cheers,

Lucas

[1] http://autotest.github.com/
[2] https://github.com/autotest/autotest/wiki/KVMAutotest