[OpenBIOS] Qemu, OpenBIOS, and HostID

[Artyom Tarasenko]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland
<mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote:
> On 28/12/13 05:26, Tarl Neustaedter wrote:
>
>> On 2013-Dec-27, 18:53 , Nick Couchman wrote:
>
>
>>> Understood, but a virtual environment is a little bit different, since
>>> the only serial number is going to be some sort of UUID that is
>>> generated either at VM start time or is generated and then maintained
>>> in a config file. MAC addresses can be customized for VMs, as well.
>>> Clearly 80000000 isn't a valid hostid, so what should OpenBIOS and/or
>>> Qemu be doing, here?
>>>
>>
>> I'd suggest that instead of h# 8000.0000, you should use h# 8012.3456 -
>> that's the value we use when debugging hardware which doesn't have the
>> idprom set up. Supposedly, nothing actually looks at the serial number
>> in the hostid, but it's that "supposedly" which worries me.
>
>
> Okay that's something that's fairly easy to do. My main questions would be:
>
> i) if nothing looks at hostid, then would it matter that it is all zeros?
>
> ii) if we do set it to 8012.3456 then if something did happen to check
> hostid then would it detect this special magic number and start to behave
> differently? (e.g. kernels detecting prototype hardware)

I'd suggest we fix it in QEMU, not in OpenBIOS. Some software may get
unhappy when a hostid in firmware diverges from the one in NVRAM.

Artyom

>> You might also check that the system mac address is getting set up
>> correctly. I know there are unexpected places that it gets used (certain
>> SCSI drivers, for example).
>
>
> Hmmm that's a good point actually. I don't believe that we currently set the
> MAC address property under /options.
>
>
> ATB,
>
> Mark.
>
-- 
Regards,
Artyom Tarasenko

linux/sparc and solaris/sparc under qemu blog:
http://tyom.blogspot.com/search/label/qemu