[SeaBIOS] Advise on updating SeaBIOS in stable

Kevin O'Connor kevin at koconnor.net
Wed Jan 13 05:51:48 CET 2010


On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 01:43:47PM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm ready to cut another qemu stable release and I'm contemplating
> whether to update to 0.5.1 in stable.  Generally speaking, we try to
> limit stable to bug fixes and changes that aren't user visible.
> 
> 0.5.1 looks like a point on the master branch as opposed to a
> separate branch.  I wonder what the thinking is within SeaBIOS about
> what sort of changes will be in the 0.5.x series vs. what would
> result in 0.6.0.

Hi Anthony,

I didn't have a particular release numbering scheme in mind when I
tagged 0.5.1.  I'd probably lean towards making a "v0.5.0.x" branch if
we want an update with just critical bug fixes.

However, there have only been a few bug fixes (mostly workarounds for
compiler oddities), though the yield fix (fb214dc7) and ram over 4gig
fix (669c991d) should go in.

If you're looking to pull in 32bit pcibios support, then I don't think
it would be worthwhile to rebase to a stable branch, as the 32bit
pcibios support is easily the biggest user visible change in v0.5.1
(in the sense that Linux will call 32bit pcibios if it's available).

A couple of other changes could be user visible (eg, mptable), but I
think the risk here is pretty small (assuming we haven't introduced a
regression).

So, I'm okay with a stable branch (eg, v0.5.0.x), but I'm not sure
what you would like to see in that branch.

-Kevin



More information about the SeaBIOS mailing list