"Marcelo Roccasalva" marcelo-centos@irrigacion.gov.ar wrote:

...

Flash support under qemu seems to be about the same as CD-ROM support. That is, you can access a device present at start up but it's not swappable.

You can swap cdrom from qemu monitor. I haven't tried, but I think the same thing can be applied to usb..

It looks like the qemu monitor should let you either eject the device or delete/add the USB drive using usb_del and usb_add. I wasn't able to get it to work. W2K gives me a control to unmount the thumb drive in the system tray which makes the drive "disappear" from W2K. Unfortunately, attaching a new drive or just reattaching the old drive isn't recognized by W2K. qemu monitor tells me it unable to add the new device or delete the old device.

If hot swapping a USB drive can be made to work with qemu, swapping a USB drive will still be ugly. The USB device number assigned by the kernel changes each time I swap thumb drives. This isn't too bad but access to /proc/bus/usb/<usb_bus_number>/<usb_dev_number> is root:root with permissions rw-r--r--. This means that each time I swap the drive I have to chmod the "new" USB device entry. I don't see this changing even if I can get qemu to let me add the new device.

I'll have to try using qemu monitor to swap a CD-ROM at some point in the future. Usually I only use W2K and IE under qemu to access those few sites that still only work with IE (e.g., my state's income tax site).

Cheers, Dave