On my machine, a guest fails to boot if it has a sound card, but not
graphical device/display is configured, because pulseaudio fails to
initialize since it can't access $HOME.
A workaround is removing the audio device, however on ARM boards there
isn't any option to do that, so -nographic always fails.
Set QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=none if no <graphics> are configured. Unfortunately
this has massive test suite fallout.
Add a qemu.conf parameter nographics_allow_host_audio, that if enabled
will pass through QEMU_AUDIO_DRV from sysconfig (similar to
vnc_allow_host_audio)
Prefer bootindex=N option for -device over the old way -boot ORDER
possibly accompanied with boot=on option for -drive. This gives us full
control over which device will actually be used for booting guest OS.
Moreover, if qemu doesn't support boot=on, this is the only way to boot
of certain disks in some configurations (such as virtio disks when used
together IDE disks) without transforming domain XML to use per device
boot elements.