[SeaBIOS] How much RAM is required?

[Markus Armbruster]

"Fred ." <eldmannen at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Markus Armbruster <armbru at redhat.com> wrote:
>> "Kevin O'Connor" <kevin at koconnor.net> writes:
>>
>>> On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 01:50:13PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>>>> Watch this:
>>>>
>>>>     $ qemu-system-x86_64 -nodefaults -vnc :0 -monitor stdio -m 16k
>>>>     QEMU 1.1.50 monitor - type 'help' for more information
>>>>     (qemu) qemu: fatal: Trying to execute code outside RAM or ROM at
>>>> 0x0000000000004000
>>>>
>>>> Admittedly a silly thing to try.  I don't really expect SeaBIOS to work
>>>> with 16KiB of RAM.  But I'm curious: how much does it require?
>>>
>>> SeaBIOS requires a minimum of 1Meg of ram.  I didn't even know one
>>> could request less than 1meg of ram from QEMU.
>>
>> I'll cook up a QEMU patch to give it at least that much.

> But QEMU may use other firmware/payload than SeaBIOS which might
> require less than 1 MB of RAM.

Good point.

Could SeaBIOS fail more cleanly when it detects insufficient RAM?