RFE: Print amount of RAM

[Igor Galić]

Hello happy people,

I'm back from a two day goose-chase where I was wondering
very much why my VMs don't boot.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2012-February/msg00106.html

In that process I upgraded my entire stack (libvirt, qemu,
seabios) but found that the boot hung at SeaBIOS trying to
boot from ROM.
After stepping through all the arguments libvirt supplied
to I found that my <memory>2048</memory> the qemu argument
-m 2 (megs) -- which wasn't quite enough. (Similarly, my
previously supplied <memory>20480</memory> weren't too much
they too were too little to boot a Linux kernel).

I've already talked to the libvirt folks, and they'll try
to get in a feature to supply a <memory unit="M"> or similar.

Now I'd like to ask you guys if you could print the amount
of RAM available -- like most other BIOSes out there already
do - it would be extremely helpful to aid troubleshooting.

Thank you very much in advance.

So long,

i

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:36:48PM -0000, Igor Galić wrote:
> Hello happy people,
>
> I'm back from a two day goose-chase where I was wondering
> very much why my VMs don't boot.
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2012-February/msg00106.html
>
> In that process I upgraded my entire stack (libvirt, qemu,
> seabios) but found that the boot hung at SeaBIOS trying to
> boot from ROM.
> After stepping through all the arguments libvirt supplied
> to I found that my <memory>2048</memory> the qemu argument
> -m 2 (megs) -- which wasn't quite enough. (Similarly, my
> previously supplied <memory>20480</memory> weren't too much
> they too were too little to boot a Linux kernel).
>
> I've already talked to the libvirt folks, and they'll try
> to get in a feature to supply a <memory unit="M"> or similar.
>
> Now I'd like to ask you guys if you could print the amount
> of RAM available -- like most other BIOSes out there already
> do - it would be extremely helpful to aid troubleshooting.

SeaBIOS boots too fast for anything useful to be seen on the screen.
That said, one can add "-chardev stdio,id=seabios -device
isa-debugcon,iobase=0x402,chardev=seabios" to the qemu command line to
see the SeaBIOS debugging output.  That output has the memory info and
much more.

-Kevin

[Igor Galić]

Cross posting from seabios@

[snip]
> > Now I'd like to ask you guys if you could print the amount
> > of RAM available -- like most other BIOSes out there already
> > do - it would be extremely helpful to aid troubleshooting.
>
> SeaBIOS boots too fast for anything useful to be seen on the screen.
> That said, one can add "-chardev stdio,id=seabios -device
> isa-debugcon,iobase=0x402,chardev=seabios" to the qemu command line
> to
> see the SeaBIOS debugging output.  That output has the memory info
> and much more.

I guess that's then something to propose for libvirt as RFE
as an extra argument for <bios useserial='yes' /> we could
introduce <bios useserial='debug' /> perhaps.
> -Kevin

Thanks Kevin.

So long,

i