[SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] E820 (Re: [v4 PATCH 00/12] SMBIOS: build full tables in QEMU)

Gabriel L. Somlo gsomlo at gmail.com
Thu Apr 3 15:32:16 CEST 2014


On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 11:42:31AM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> Unless you want to do OVMF development yourself (ie. as long as you'd
> like to test only), you're best off with
> 
> (a) Gerd's packages:
> 
> http://www.kraxel.org/repos/
> 
> (b) If you use a Fedora host, you can also try a (recently refreshed)
> Copr build, thanks to Paolo:
> 
> http://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/bonzini/ovmf/
> 
> Under (a) you find some short instructions, and a set of RPMs that is
> automatically rebuilt twice a day (IIRC).
> 
> Both (a) and (b) include the downstream-only SMBIOS patches.
>
> [...]
>
> You don't see SMBIOS tables in the guest because you've built upstream
> OVMF. As I said before, upstream OvmfPkg doesn't include my SMBIOS
> patches. Both (a) and (b) do however.

Oh, OK. Basically, I'm interested in looking at the sources
(specifically, the SMBIOS code :) ) to try and develop my own
sense of what might be the most agreeable way forward for my
QEMU smbios patches... That way, I'd actually have a (hopefully
somewhat intelligent) position of my own to support :) :)

For that, ideally, I'd like to clone a git repo (and pull once
every few days to stay on top of things). Looks like the top-level
upstream one doesn't have your smbios code, so would there be a
"mid-stream" (for the lack of a better term) git repo you have
that I can clone and hack against for the smbios stuff ?

I ask because yesterday was the first time I started really paying
attention to edk2 and ovmf, and I don't yet have a sense of how fast
the "state of the universe" would run away from me while my back is
turned, i.e. how fast a point-in-time snapshot of e.g. Gerd or Paolo's
RPMs would become stale... Extracting and patching source code from
RPMs is OK once or twice, but I imagine will be much less fun than
"git pull" once it gets repetitive :D

> One further note (also mentioned in OvmfPkg/README): don't use OVMF.fd
> with -bios; use it with -pflash (you need a Linux 3.7+ host for this).
> This will give your guest real runtime variable services -- non-volatile
> variable data will be written back to the OVMF.fd file.

Good to know (-bios == read-only, -pflash == writable) :)

I'm really only in it for testing smbios interactions with qemu though,
at least at this stage... :)

Thanks a ton,
--Gabriel



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