[SeaBIOS] [coreboot] seabios feature request : reboot VM or retry boot devices when no valid boot disk is found

[Maurits van de Lande]

Hello,

Thank you for considering the feature.
> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 01:02:10PM +0300, Gleb Natapov wrote:
>> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 10:01:49AM -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
>>> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 03:04:52AM +0200, Peter Stuge wrote:
>>>> Kevin O'Connor wrote:
>>>>> +// Unable to find bootable device - warn user and eventually retry.
>>>>> +static void
>>>>> +boot_fail(void)
>>>>> +{
>>>>> +    printf("No bootable device.\n");
>>>>> +    // Wait for 60 seconds and then reboot.
>>>>> +    u32 end = calc_future_timer(60*1000);
>>>> I'd suggest printf("No bootable device found. Retrying in 5 seconds...\n");
>>>> and lowering the timeout.
>>> I'd only do this if the timeout was large - indeed I think 60 seconds
>>> is a little on the low side.  (Not being able to boot is almost always
>>> an error - it should be fixed not covered up.)
>>>
>> Agree. For VM use it's better to notify management about it.
>>
>>> That said, making it a config option is trivial.
>>>
>> The patch below does not allow to disable the behaviour (short of setting
>> ridiculously long timeout). Lets make 0 timeout to mean never timeout
>> and make it a default.
> How about -1 to indicate no reboot.  Also, I think a 60 second reboot
> is a good default.  Maurits indicated his off-the-shelf BIOS did this,
> and I can see where it would be useful.  (I've run into cases where a
> USB device didn't spin up in time and there was no indication it was
> present - if this were to happen in a datacenter environment, it would
> be a real pain to have to go find the machine.)
>
> -Kevin
In my case a 60 second reboot will do fine. Then the VM's can eventualy 
boot when the iSCSI storage is up again. I do not know how seabios 
integrates with qemu and KVM but it would be nice if the new reboot 
timeout option could be used without having to modify qemu.
When the bootmenu is enabled I found the following line in my  VM config 
file
< bootmenu enable="yes"/>
Does this mean that all options specified after bootmenu are being send 
to seabios? Could a boot 60 second timeout value be set like this?
< bootmenu enable="no" boot_timeout="60"/>

-Maurits

>
> --- a/src/boot.c
> +++ b/src/boot.c
> @@ -617,6 +617,29 @@ boot_rom(u32 vector)
>       call_boot_entry(so, 0);
>   }
>
> +// Unable to find bootable device - warn user and eventually retry.
> +static void
> +boot_fail(void)
> +{
> +    u32 retrytime = romfile_loadint("etc/boot-fail-wait", 60*1000);
> +    if (retrytime == (u32)-1)
> +        printf("No bootable device.\n");
> +    else
> +        printf("No bootable device.  Retrying in %d seconds.\n", retrytime/1000);
> +    // Wait for 'retrytime' milliseconds and then reboot.
> +    u32 end = calc_future_timer(retrytime);
> +    for (;;) {
> +        if (retrytime != (u32)-1&&  check_timer(end))
> +            break;
> +        wait_irq();
> +    }
> +    printf("Rebooting.\n");
> +    struct bregs br;
> +    memset(&br, 0, sizeof(br));
> +    br.code = SEGOFF(SEG_BIOS, (u32)reset_vector);
> +    call16big(&br);
> +}
> +
>   // Determine next boot method and attempt a boot using it.
>   static void
>   do_boot(u16 seq_nr)
> @@ -624,12 +647,8 @@ do_boot(u16 seq_nr)
>       if (! CONFIG_BOOT)
>           panic("Boot support not compiled in.\n");
>
> -    if (seq_nr>= BEVCount) {
> -        printf("No bootable device.\n");
> -        // Loop with irqs enabled - this allows ctrl+alt+delete to work.
> -        for (;;)
> -            wait_irq();
> -    }
> +    if (seq_nr>= BEVCount)
> +        boot_fail();
>
>       // Boot the given BEV type.
>       struct bev_s *ie =&BEV[seq_nr];
>
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