Hi,
I'm not sure what would depend on that. The virtio drivers don't need to. You just won't find those devices on real hardware. And hell, if someone actually makes real hardware that behaves like a virtio block device, why *shouldn't* it work?
It's basically two things we have:
(a) Hardware initialization: get config info via fw-cfg, map+init pci devices (src/pciinit.c), create acpi tables, ... (b) Hardware drivers for virtual hardware (virtio-blk, virtio-scsi, lsi, ...).
(a) is done by seabios only when booted directly, otherwise xen / coreboot /ovmf will handle that part.
(b) currently depends on CONFIG_QEMU, but those are useful for other cases too, to also boot from virtio when running on coreboot / csm.
I think the only use case is for enabling the lsi SCSI and whatever the other driver was that was only ever tested on the qemu emulation?
That, and I think also to reduce the number of options.
I guess we should have a choice where you can pick coreboot / qemu / xen / csm (I think xen isn't there today exactly because they want the virtio drivers).
Then add a CONFIG_QEMU_DRIVERS menu where we put all virtual hardware drivers in. So when building for real hardware you'll just say 'n' there and all virtual drivers will be skipped.
cheers, Gerd