Hi,
The 1.11 seabios release which is just around the corner brings serial console support to seabios. Which is useful for kvmtool too. So I decided to undust my old kvmtool support patch series and check out where we stand.
Patch #1 adds the config option, wires up everything and adds ram detection for kvmtool. Patches #2 and #3 tweak the seabios virtio drivers so they work with kvmtool.
With that in place seabios works nicely. Loads grub from hard disk, allows to edit menu entries, loads and runs the linux kernel.
But there are also some known issues:
(1) ram detection is clumpsy (see patch #1) due to kvmtool not passing ram information to the firmware (on x86, seems other platforms use the device tree for that).
(2) kvmtool virtio implementation seems to have some bugs. specifically handing over the virtio-blk devices from seabios to the linux kernel doesn't work (see patch #3).
(3) when kernels are booted via seabios+grub all the command line args kvmtool adds to the kernel command line on direct kernel boot will not be passed to the kernel. Not sure how much of a problem that is in practice, due to (2) I didn't yet manage to boot a linux guest to the login prompt.
cheers, Gerd
Gerd Hoffmann (3): kvmtool: initial support kvmtool: allow mmio for legacy bar 0 kvmtool: support larger virtio queues
Makefile | 1 + src/fw/paravirt.h | 3 +++ src/hw/virtio-ring.h | 2 +- src/fw/paravirt.c | 48 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ src/hw/virtio-pci.c | 16 ++++++++++++---- src/post.c | 4 +++- src/sercon.c | 2 ++ src/Kconfig | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++-- 8 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)