Hi, We are updating some machines in our server farm to Ubuntu natty (KVM / Opennebula cluster). Since then we used to have some VM with shared read-only IDE disks to mirror software repositories through several isolated networks (one-way data diode). The updated qemu does not allow it. It failed to start the VM with a 'Can't use a read-only drive' error. After checking in the qemu git, it seems that this has been forbidden by this commit '7aa9c811ca0761918a0252d0f923a80224953fa6' : ----------------------------- Author: Markus Armbruster 2010-06-28 19:10:36 Committer: Kevin Wolf 2010-07-06 17:05:50 Parent: c4d74df726cb3791d9f1661b58067df5608b627e (ide: Make ide_init_drive() return success) Child: dce9e92834cc4f962e547cae46b73ca559d05b0c (ide: Reject invalid CHS geometry) Branches: master, remotes/origin/master, remotes/origin/stable-0.13, remotes/origin/stable-0.14, remotes/origin/stable-0.15 Follows: v0.12.0-rc0 Precedes: v0.13.0-rc0 ide: Reject readonly drives unless CD-ROM drive_init() doesn't permit option readonly for if=ide, but that's worthless: we get it via if=none and -device. Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf ----------------------------- I do not understand the comment, if there is a workaround or if it something to avoid. May you help me to understand it? Thank you, Frederic