On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:52:17PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
On Thu, 2013-03-21 at 13:49 +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
How about we don't bother to determine this at runtime at all?
Because it will be a PITA for testers + developers to figure the correct .config switches of the day during the transition phase?
Why is it a PITA? Are you developing QEMU? Just use the makefile from roms/config.seabios Are you using QEMU binary? Just use the defaults.
SeaBIOS binaries are running on a wide range of qemu versions today. Changing that is a big deal. People are not used to it, and even when writing it to the README people will stumble over it. It also is pretty inconvenient in a number of cases. For starters the usual way to package seabios and qemu in distros is to have separate packages ...
I agree that for the foreseeable future, we should be able to build SeaBIOS such that it can cope with old versions of Qemu that *don't* provide ACPI tables.
And of course we should make it cope with new versions of Qemu that *do*.
But I'm not sure I see any point in doing it table-by-table. Surely it can be all or nothing?
-- dwmw2
If someone wants to add a feature where same bios works with old and new qemu, I don't see a problem here. I also don't see why we should not allow building a minimal bios that only works with the new specific qemu. This is the only option that distros will actually ship, so runtime detection is a developer's tool really, seems quite sane to allow saving some resources by removing it.
No?