SeaBIOS May 2012

seabios@seabios.org

23 participants
48 discussions

Re: [SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Peter Stuge 07 May '12

07 May '12

Fred . wrote: > And in terms of standards compliance? The nature of BIOS is that there isn't a standard to comply with. > I know proprietary BIOS have advantage when it comes to SMBIOS due > to the implementation in SeaBIOS lagging behind several versions. Do you know of concrete issues because of this lag, or did you notice a number that is smaller in SeaBIOS than somewhere else? Ie. do you see a technical disadvantage because of the difference in SMBIOS versions? //Peter

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Re: [SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Gleb Natapov 07 May '12

07 May '12

On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 10:44:21AM +0200, Fred . wrote: > On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Gleb Natapov <gleb(a)redhat.com> wrote: > > On Sun, May 06, 2012 at 10:26:31PM +0200, Fred . wrote: > >> And in terms of standards compliance? > >> > >> I know proprietary BIOS have advantage when it comes to SMBIOS due to > >> the implementation in SeaBIOS lagging behind several versions. > >> > >> On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Peter Stuge <peter(a)stuge.se> wrote: > >> > Fred . wrote: > >> >> How is SeaBIOS working towards the non-technical goals of the project? > >> > > >> > This is not so clear. I'm not even sure that there are non-technical > >> > goals for the project. > >> > > >> > Competing with commercial BIOS products would require a company to > >> > put a SeaBIOS-based PC firmware to market, quite likely in concert > >> > with coreboot. I know of one company which offers among other things > >> > coreboot services, Sage Engineering, who are quite active in the > >> > coreboot community. http://www.se-eng.com/coreboot.html > >> > > >> > But even so you can see that the business model is different from > >> > commercial BIOS products, and already this small difference presents > >> > a non-technical challenge. > >> > >> SeaBIOS lacks documentation. > >> It lacks communication. > >> The website is not updated with news about the development. > >> There is no mention of what's new, whats planned, etc. > > Now I am curious what other BIOSes give you all that? In all that points > > Seabios in not different from most other open source project. > > > > -- > > Gleb. > > Perhaps other BIOS have private channels to make such communications > directly to their customers. SeaBIOS customers pretty much define SeaBIOS roadmap, so perhaps such communication is unnecessary. > Or perhaps they don't need to due to having been in the BIOS game > pretty much since it started. Or perhaps they do not care because most of the BIOS "customers" do not aware of its existence or that they have an alternative? > > I think information, documentation, roadmaps, public announcements, > timely communication would be good. -- Gleb.

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Re: [SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Gleb Natapov 07 May '12

07 May '12

On Sun, May 06, 2012 at 10:26:31PM +0200, Fred . wrote: > And in terms of standards compliance? > > I know proprietary BIOS have advantage when it comes to SMBIOS due to > the implementation in SeaBIOS lagging behind several versions. > > On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 8:00 PM, Peter Stuge <peter(a)stuge.se> wrote: > > Fred . wrote: > >> How is SeaBIOS working towards the non-technical goals of the project? > > > > This is not so clear. I'm not even sure that there are non-technical > > goals for the project. > > > > Competing with commercial BIOS products would require a company to > > put a SeaBIOS-based PC firmware to market, quite likely in concert > > with coreboot. I know of one company which offers among other things > > coreboot services, Sage Engineering, who are quite active in the > > coreboot community. http://www.se-eng.com/coreboot.html > > > > But even so you can see that the business model is different from > > commercial BIOS products, and already this small difference presents > > a non-technical challenge. > > SeaBIOS lacks documentation. > It lacks communication. > The website is not updated with news about the development. > There is no mention of what's new, whats planned, etc. Now I am curious what other BIOSes give you all that? In all that points Seabios in not different from most other open source project. -- Gleb.

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Re: [SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Peter Stuge 06 May '12

06 May '12

Fred . wrote: > How is SeaBIOS working towards the non-technical goals of the project? This is not so clear. I'm not even sure that there are non-technical goals for the project. Competing with commercial BIOS products would require a company to put a SeaBIOS-based PC firmware to market, quite likely in concert with coreboot. I know of one company which offers among other things coreboot services, Sage Engineering, who are quite active in the coreboot community. http://www.se-eng.com/coreboot.html But even so you can see that the business model is different from commercial BIOS products, and already this small difference presents a non-technical challenge. > That said, still curious about a technical comparison. As far as BIOS goes, SeaBIOS will boot and run I believe any OS that a commercial BIOS product does. Differences at this point are perhaps primarily how the build is configured and run, how execution is configured, and the presentation of SeaBIOS during runtime. Because SeaBIOS has a technical goal of not spending more time than neccessary on any task, there isn't much presentation to talk about. Build configuration in SeaBIOS is based on Kconfig, comfortable for anyone who has built a Linux kernel or busybox, but perhaps not completely intuitive for developers who primarily have experience from using Windows systems. The build system itself of SeaBIOS relies on the GNU toolchain, including optionally rather new features, contrary to commercial BIOS products which typically rely on quite old Microsoft toolchains. Runtime configuration in SeaBIOS consists of the F12 menu when multiple boot sources are found, and the QEMU-specific fwcfg interface - compared to the classic text-mode setup menu screens in commercial BIOS products. Then there's of course the fact that BIOS is no longer really relevant for many mainboard vendors, whose customers expect UEFI. //Peter

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Re: [SeaBIOS] SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Peter Stuge 06 May '12

06 May '12

This has very little to do with technical properties, and is much more about politics which obviously require a different approach than technicalities. //Peter

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SeaBIOS vs other BIOS?
by Fred . 06 May '12

06 May '12

What features and functionality does SeaBIOS have that other BIOS does not? What features and functionality does other BIOS have that is better than what SeaBIOS offers?

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Re: [SeaBIOS] [PATCH] Add IASL definition
by Kevin O'Connor 04 May '12

04 May '12

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 11:28:00AM -0600, Marc Jones wrote: > Add IASL definition to the Makefile. > > Add IASL definition to Makefile so it can be passed by the user. Thanks. I applied this change. -Kevin

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[qemu patch] pci: pass i/o windows via fwcfg
by Gerd Hoffmann 04 May '12

04 May '12

This patch adds a fw_cfg entry for the PCI I/O windows. It holds four values, 64bit each. The first two specify the 32bit PCI I/O window below 4G, the second two the 64bit PCI I/O window above 4G. The 32bit PCI I/O window used to start at the fixed address 0xe0000000. Now it starts at the end of low ram, i.e. machines with less than 3.5 GB of memory get a larger PCI I/O window. The 64bit PCI I/O window is located above all memory, is 64G in size and is aligned according to its size, i.e. usually it starts at 64GB and ends at 128GB. When guests have lots of memory it gets moved up accordingly. Signed-off-by: Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel(a)redhat.com> --- hw/fw_cfg.h | 1 + hw/pc.c | 15 ++++++++++++++- 2 files changed, 15 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/hw/fw_cfg.h b/hw/fw_cfg.h index 856bf91..3042954 100644 --- a/hw/fw_cfg.h +++ b/hw/fw_cfg.h @@ -27,6 +27,7 @@ #define FW_CFG_SETUP_SIZE 0x17 #define FW_CFG_SETUP_DATA 0x18 #define FW_CFG_FILE_DIR 0x19 +#define FW_CFG_PCI_WINDOWS 0x1a #define FW_CFG_FILE_FIRST 0x20 #define FW_CFG_FILE_SLOTS 0x10 diff --git a/hw/pc.c b/hw/pc.c index 4d34a33..a823b27 100644 --- a/hw/pc.c +++ b/hw/pc.c @@ -72,7 +72,8 @@ #define MSI_ADDR_BASE 0xfee00000 -#define E820_NR_ENTRIES 16 +#define E820_NR_ENTRIES 16 +#define PCI64_SIZE 0x1000000000LL /* 64 GB */ struct e820_entry { uint64_t address; @@ -987,6 +988,7 @@ void pc_memory_init(MemoryRegion *system_memory, int linux_boot, i; MemoryRegion *ram, *option_rom_mr; MemoryRegion *ram_below_4g, *ram_above_4g; + uint64_t *pcimem, pci64_base; void *fw_cfg; linux_boot = (kernel_filename != NULL); @@ -1027,6 +1029,17 @@ void pc_memory_init(MemoryRegion *system_memory, fw_cfg = bochs_bios_init(); rom_set_fw(fw_cfg); + pcimem = g_malloc0(sizeof(uint64_t) * 4); + /* 32bit pci io window */ + pcimem[0] = cpu_to_le64(below_4g_mem_size); + pcimem[1] = cpu_to_le64(0xFEC00000 - 1); + /* 64bit pci io window */ + pci64_base = (0x100000000ULL + above_4g_mem_size + PCI64_SIZE) & ~(PCI64_SIZE-1); + pcimem[2] = cpu_to_le64(pci64_base); + pcimem[3] = cpu_to_le64(pci64_base + PCI64_SIZE - 1); + fw_cfg_add_bytes(fw_cfg, FW_CFG_PCI_WINDOWS, + (uint8_t *)pcimem, sizeof(uint64_t) * 4); + if (linux_boot) { load_linux(fw_cfg, kernel_filename, initrd_filename, kernel_cmdline, below_4g_mem_size); } -- 1.7.1

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SeaBIOS May 2012