On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 02:33:52PM +0900, Daniel Castro wrote:
Good Day,
In order to give PV Drivers to SeaBIOS we will need to solve a few problems, one is the following: Does a booting kernel informs the BIOS that it will leave real mode and not use it again? When the booting kernel uses CPU real mode for the last time, how can we (Xen or SeaBIOS) know that real mode will no longer be used, and hence BIOS calls will not be issued?
In the general case, no.
The ACPI spec does define a mechanism for the OS to inform the BIOS that it is transitioning from "Legacy state" to "Working state" via an SMI. SeaBIOS does have code for this (see src/smm.c), but it doesn't currently do anything interesting. Unfortunately, this is only available for OSs that support ACPI.
We want upon last real mode usage to leave all Xen PV information in a clean state, this means, closing the channel and ring between the newly created domain and the host system.
Is it required to close the channel? Can opening a new channel implicitly close the old channel (I believe this is what the virtio stuff does)?
-Kevin