Does anybody needs LinuxBIOS for VMware virtual machines?

[Eric W. Biederman]

"Dmitriy Budko" <dbudko at vmware.com> writes:

> > From: Ronald G. Minnich
> > On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Dmitriy Budko wrote:
> > 
> > > Does anybody needs LinuxBIOS for VMware virtual machines?
> > > If you want it please describe why do you want it.
> > 
> > it would sure make it easier to do full-up sims of linuxbios-equipped 
> > systems.
> 
> So, you don't need it for "production" systems, only for development, 
> do you?
> 
> How difficult is it to port Intel 440BX chipset support from
> V1 to V2?

Not terribly hard.  It is more of a time/desire thing.  Does vmware
accurately simulate what is required to bring memory up or do we
get to short cut that.  If the latter the porting could be done
very quickly.  Memory initialization is generally the hard part,
of a LinuxBIOS port and would likely be trivial under vmware :)

> It seems to me that supporting a new SIO chips (the emulated 
> NS PC97338/PC87338) should be easy.

Right it should not be a problem there.

The case that was discussed recently with vmware was to do things
the other way around.  The observation was made that for server
clusters dedicated to running vmware, running LinuxBIOS underneath
could help boot time and cluster management.

Eric