On 28/12/13 05:26, Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
On 2013-Dec-27, 18:53 , Nick Couchman wrote:
Understood, but a virtual environment is a little bit different, since the only serial number is going to be some sort of UUID that is generated either at VM start time or is generated and then maintained in a config file. MAC addresses can be customized for VMs, as well. Clearly 80000000 isn't a valid hostid, so what should OpenBIOS and/or Qemu be doing, here?
I'd suggest that instead of h# 8000.0000, you should use h# 8012.3456 - that's the value we use when debugging hardware which doesn't have the idprom set up. Supposedly, nothing actually looks at the serial number in the hostid, but it's that "supposedly" which worries me.
Okay that's something that's fairly easy to do. My main questions would be:
i) if nothing looks at hostid, then would it matter that it is all zeros?
ii) if we do set it to 8012.3456 then if something did happen to check hostid then would it detect this special magic number and start to behave differently? (e.g. kernels detecting prototype hardware)
You might also check that the system mac address is getting set up correctly. I know there are unexpected places that it gets used (certain SCSI drivers, for example).
Hmmm that's a good point actually. I don't believe that we currently set the MAC address property under /options.
ATB,
Mark.