Bug 514831

Summary:	cannot attach USB floppy device to existing VM
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	James Ralston <ralston>
Component:	libvirt	Assignee:	Daniel Veillard <veillard>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	11	CC:	berrange, clalance, crobinso, itamar, veillard, virt-maint
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2009-07-31 09:04:21 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description James Ralston 2009-07-30 23:12:58 UTC

I have a KVM-based virtual guest on my laptop. I've attached a USB floppy drive (which appears as /dev/sdb) to my laptop. I need to make that floppy drive visible to the guest.

But:

virsh # attach-disk myguest /dev/sdb fd0 --driver tap --type floppy
error: No support floppy in command 'attach-disk'

Hmmm. Let's try without --floppy:

virsh # attach-disk myguest /dev/sdb fd0 --driver tap
error: internal error cannot attach device on inactive domain

Ok, so I start the virtual guest, then try again:

virsh # attach-disk myguest /dev/sdb fd0 --driver tap --type floppy
error: this function is not supported by the hypervisor: disk bus 'ide' cannot be hotplugged.

Whee!

From searching, I see that others have had problems performing this operation as well, but I haven't seen any resolutions.

For now, I've taken a decidedly brute-force approach, which is to rename /usr/bin/qemu-kvm to /usr/bin/qemu-kvm.REAL, and create this script as /usr/bin/qemu-kvm:

#! /bin/sh
exec qemu-kvm.REAL $@ -fda /dev/sdb

It works, but virsh could really use a healthy sprinkle of FAIL-B-GONE...

Versions:

0:libvirt-0.6.2-13.fc11

Comment 1 Daniel Berrangé 2009-07-31 09:04:21 UTC

The 'attach-disk' command is for transient hotplugging of new disks, or changing the media on existing CDROM/floppy disks. It cannot hotplug IDE disks/cdroms or floppy disks, only hotplug VirtIO or SCSI.

If you wish to add a floppy disk, then power off the VM, and use 'virsh edit GUEST' to alter the persistent config. Or use a combination fo 'virsh dumpxml', emacs, followed by 'virsh define'.