[SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Passing boot order from qemu to seabios

[Gleb Natapov]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 01:48:09PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Bernhard Kohl <bernhard.kohl at nsn.com> wrote:
> > Am 11.10.2010 12:18, schrieb ext Gleb Natapov:
> >>
> >> Currently if VM is started with multiple disks it is almost impossible to
> >> guess which one of them will be used as boot device especially if there
> >> is a mix of ATA/virtio/SCSI devices. Essentially BIOS decides the order
> >> and without looking into the code you can't tell what the order will
> >> be (and in qemu-kvm if boot=on is used it brings even more havoc). We
> >> should allow fine-grained control of boot order from qemu command line,
> >> or as a minimum control what device will be used for booting.
> >>
> >> To do that along with inventing syntax to specify boot order on qemu
> >> command line we need to communicate boot order to seabios via fw_cfg
> >> interface. For that we need to have a way to unambiguously specify a
> >> disk from qemu to seabios.  PCI bus address is not enough since not all
> >> devices are PCI (do we care about them?) and since one PCI device may
> >> control more then one disk (ATA slave/master, SCSI LUNs). We can do what
> >> EDD specification does. Describe disk as:
> >>     bus type (isa/pci),
> >>     address on a bus (16 bit base address for isa, b/s/f for pci)
> >>     device type (ATA/SCSI/VIRTIO)
> >>     device path (slave/master for ATA, LUN for SCSI, nothing for virtio)
> >>
> >> Will it cover all use cased? Any other ideas?
> >
> > I think this also applies to network booting via gPXE. Usually our VMs
> > have 4 NICs, mixed virtio-net and PCI pass-through. 2 of the NICs shall
> > be used for booting, even if there are hard disks or floppy disks
> > connected. This scenario is currently almost impossible to configure.
> 
> Here is a gPXE to support fw_cfg.  You can pass gPXE script files from
> the host to gPXE inside the guest.  This means you can boot specific
> NICs:
> http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/43777/
> 
> Just wanted to post the link because it is related to the gPXE side of
> this discussion.
> 
Don't we load gPXE for each NIC and seabios passes PCI device to boot from
when it invokes one of them?

--
			Gleb.