[OpenBIOS] Qemu, OpenBIOS, and HostID

Mark Cave-Ayland mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk
Sat Dec 28 19:00:07 CET 2013


On 28/12/13 17:37, Artyom Tarasenko wrote:

>> 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.

Yes, if things do try and access the NVRAM directly then that would 
definitely be a better solution (I had no idea that QEMU did this until 
I read your previous email!). It's not particularly on my radar at the 
moment as I'm back deep in SPARC64-land, but I'd be happy to support 
anyone that did come up with something suitable.


ATB,

Mark.



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