[SeaBIOS] [PATCHv2 0/6] Improved multi-platform support

Ian Campbell ijc at hellion.org.uk
Tue Feb 12 09:32:29 CET 2013


On Mon, 2013-02-11 at 19:06 -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 12:43:29PM +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-02-11 at 10:54 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2013-02-09 at 14:08 -0500, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> > > > This patch series is less ambitious than the previous - SeaBIOS can't
> > > > be compiled for multiple platforms (eg, QEMU, CSM, coreboot) at the
> > > > same time. 
> > > 
> > > Out of interest, why not include Xen in that list? Do we gain any real
> > > benefit from building a multi-platform binary that can be used both
> > > natively under qemu *and* from Xen? 
> > 
> > I suppose it could be argued that from the PoV of SeaBIOS a Xen guest
> > (which uses qemu for device models) is not all that different from
> > qemu/kvm.
> > 
> > I don't know if distros prefer to have fewer images or not, once you
> > have 2 I guess having N is not such a big deal for something the size
> > and build time of SeaBIOS.
> 
> Looking briefly at the fc18 rpms, it appears that seabios is included
> into the hvmloader binary.  If so, I doubt it would matter to the
> distros as then it's already a separate copy (embedded within
> hvmloader).

Right. The separate copy I was thinking of is in the SeaBIOS package
which the Xen build depends on and pulls in the image to link into
hvmloader, this is how it is done on Debian at least. The other option
is to embed a copy of the SeaBIOS source into Xen which is what we as
upstream do but I can see why distros might not want to carry two copies
of the same source.

> BTW, does Xen implement the "fw_cfg" interface to pass config info
> (eg, bootorder) to SeaBIOS?

We support setting boot order in our toolstack, which finds its way to
qemu's command line and then to the guest. So I guess the answer must be
yes.

Ian.
-- 
Ian Campbell


O.K., fine.




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