Due to a bug report by someone trying to add two cd drives to a Q35 domain in virt-manager (which assumes all CD drives are IDE), I've learned that libvirt doesn't support adding a "piix3-ide" controller when there is no ide controller for the domain (or when there are more than 4 disk devices that need to be connected to an IDE controller). It does dutifully add: <controller type='ide' index='n'/> as many times as necessary, it's just that there is no code behind that to add the device to the qemu commandline. I first thought I should add support for this, but then had second thoughts after following this reasoning: 1) I'm not sure exactly where the piix3-ide controller was added to qemu, but it was apparently sometime after qemu-1.2.0 (at least according to tests/qemuhelpdata/qemu-1.2.0-device). 2) At some point (again not sure, but it was there at least in qemu 1.0) support for a SATA controller was added (named ich9-achi by qemu), and it can also accept CD devices. So there is no version of qemu that has piix3-ide and no ich9-ahci. 3) "ide old, ahci new" 4) I'm doubtful there is any OS old enough to require an IDE disk controller rather than SATA that anyone would also want to put > 4 disk devices on. That leads me to think that maybe it is a better idea to just log an error if someone tries to add a disk with bus='ide' on a Q35 domain, or add more than 4 of them on an i440fx domain. Does anyone have an opinion, or (better yet) a smoking gun (e.g. problems with piix3-ide, or alternately problems with ahci or a situation where IDE would be required) that will force action in one direction or the other? (One possible example - although ahci was added on or before qemu 1.0, up until the most recent upstream it wasn't possible to migrate or save a domain with an ahci controller. Do we need to worry about people with qemu < 2.3.0 that want > 4 IDE devices? Or should we figure that if none have come up before now, likely none will come up in the future either?)