Anthony Liguori wrote:
Patrick Georgi wrote:
With coreboot, seabios and Duet, it should be reasonably simple to provide a single BIOS image that selects (based on nvram - ie. configuration) which interface to provide: PCBIOS or UEFI.
That isn't terribly useful for QEMU because it implies that QEMU needs to make the decision about which one to use. If QEMU was capable of making that decision without user intervention, then we could just select to load PCBIOS or UEFI.
Are you guys sure you want to go down that road rather than using an UEFI with a CSM? There may be cases when you really want to boot legacy even though your client can do UEFI.
I don't know enough about EFI, but my concern is that down the road, hardware devices will start to exist that require EFI because they implement EFI modules and not legacy option ROMs. In order to support PCI passthrough of such devices, we will need to provide an EFI capable firmware.
It's really just a matter of how long before this becomes a problem for us.
This was attempted for Open Firmware and never happened during its life time. I doubt there is any incentive for vendors to ship devices without legacy option roms, especially since there is no advantage in doing so.
Stefan