[SeaBIOS] [PATCH 00/11] Relocate init code to high memory

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 08:34:40AM +0200, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 11:34:31PM -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > Yeah.  It looks like kvm is updating the ram at 0xffff0000 when writes
> > are done to 0xf0000.  It's not ideal.
> > 
> AFAIK immediately after reset memory accesses to 0xffff0000 and 0xf0000
> are directed to exactly same ROM chip. Are you saying that after shadowing
> BIOS at location 0xf0000 and modifying it in memory BIOS copy as seeing
> at 0xffff0000 changes too?

It appears that way.  I added the following code to seabios' ram_probe
(you could add it just about anywhere):

    {
        static u32 myvar;
        u32 *myvardelta = (void*)&myvar + 0xfff00000;
        dprintf(1, "1: myvar=%d/%d\n", myvar, *myvardelta);
        barrier();
        myvar = 99;
        dprintf(1, "2: myvar=%d/%d\n", myvar, *myvardelta);
        barrier();
        myvar = 13;
        dprintf(1, "3: myvar=%d/%d\n", myvar, *myvardelta);
    }

On qemu I get:

1: myvar=0/0
2: myvar=99/0
3: myvar=13/0

On kvm I get:

1: myvar=0/0
2: myvar=99/99
3: myvar=13/13

Static variables are placed in the f-segment, so it looks like writes
are going to both places on kvm.  The 0xfff00000 should basically
never change (on a real machine you'd need to send erase/write
sequences to the flash chip to change the contents).  This is qemu-kvm
that ships with FC13: qemu-kvm-0.12.5

-Kevin