Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

After scoring a copy of The Linux Journal courtesy of Tridge (courtesy of Vanessa Kendrick, for whom Tridge did some interesting data recovery), I read about QEMU and its ability to simulate a simple set of hardware suitable for running different operating systems on. This was convenient, for I had recently got a project where I wanted to be able to run a program in Windows but didn't want to have to reboot into XP every time to do it.

(The program is the GURPS Character Assistant, fourth edition. Yes, I'm one of those dice-wielding role-playing nerds. And you thought it couldn't get any worse... :-)

In the process, I discovered a small, er, novelty about QEMU: it's FAT drive emulation is FAT16. Any directory that's too large to fit in that will either give you a helpful error message:

Directory does not fit in FAT16
qemu: could not open hard disk image 'fat:/home/'

Or a less helpful one:

qemu: /builddir/build/BUILD/qemu-0.8.0/block-vvfat.c:97: array_get: Assertion `index < array->next' failed.
Aborted

A couple of people have mentioned this problem in a couple of posts on different forums. No solutions yet, nor any indication that this is indeed the problem. But I thought I'd mention it...

Now to dispel that nagging doubt that this will be another of those moments where I later regret opening my mouth because it appears that it was opened foot-input rather than intelligence-output. The fact that this doesn't seem to get much attention, with QEMU being so heavily used everywhere, probably means that I've just stated the bleeding obvious and trivial. Like emailing Abigail with a suggestion for an improvement to a Perl module and then realising that the very thing I was suggesting was already available in the language and that it was completely a moot point. Yeah, that was a good feeling.