performance: 0.713
device: 0.712
KVM: 0.706
boot: 0.654
graphic: 0.616
vnc: 0.603
PID: 0.592
semantic: 0.532
other: 0.487
permissions: 0.481
network: 0.443
socket: 0.430
debug: 0.420
files: 0.401

detect error when kernel and initrd images exceed ram size

I was unable to figure out why my VM wasn't booting when I added a "-initrd" image.  I would launch qemu and get no output, and no error message, it would just spin.

Turns out my initrd image was around 270 MB but I wasn't giving an explicit ram size to qemu.  I was told the default memory size was around 120 MB so this was definitely a problem.  I think that the qemu "pseudo-bootloader" should detect when the kernel image and initrd image sizes exceed the size of ram and print a nice error to the user, something like:

Error: the total size of the given boot images (342M) exceeds the size allocated for memory (120M)

We could also do a better job of identifying when different things (initrd, kernel, dtb) overlap in memory.


As of the 4.1 release we should now do a better job of identifying overlaps between initrd, kernel, end of ram, etc, for the built-in arm bootloader.