https://blog.chrishowie.com/2019/09/19/hot-swapping-virtio-disks-on-qemu/#comment-767

Jacob Welsh
July 11, 2022 at 4:42 pm

This piece was quite helpful, if only to convince me that while what I sought is indeed possible with qemu, it's just not worth the bother, unless perhaps building some higher-level interface on top. Which I suppose is to be expected since nobody does their own system administration anymore anyway, having entirely passed the buck to "the cloud".

I mean, is there actual documentation for *any* of this? In my local qemu, the help message for drive_add doesn't mention the "id" or even "format" parameters, nor the "none" option for "if", nor the meaning of the required magic "slot" number ; and for "device_add" all it offers is "like -device on the command line", which is actually anti-helpful since -device isn't needed to add drives on the command line.