[SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] allocation zone extensions for the firmware linker/loader

[Laszlo Ersek]

On 06/05/17 11:54, Igor Mammedov wrote:

> BTW:
> how OVMF would deal with booting 32-bit OS if it would allocate
> ACPI tables above 4Gb?
> For BIOS on baremetal I'd expect some switch in settings, something
> like "Disable 32-bit OS support".

In order to answer your question exhaustively, I'd have to ponder this a
lot longer. For now my basic answer is the following:

- If you can allocate memory above 4GB in the DXE phase, that means your
DXE and BDS phases are 64-bit. Which in turn implies you *cannot* boot a
32-bit OS at all.

Generally speaking, with PI / UEFI, the bitness of the firmware (the DXE
and the BDS phases) and the bitness of the OS (incl. its UEFI boot
loader) must be identical.

As a trick, Linux can work around this, in *one* direction -- 64-bit
Linux can run on 32-bit UEFI firmware (on x86; not sure about other
arches). But, the other direction (32-bit UEFI OS on 64-bit firmware)
cannot work, minimally because you can only call the UEFI runtime
services in 64-bit mode.

In short (again, this is quite rudimentary), if your memory allocation
in the DXE and/or BDS phases ends up being served from above 4GB, you
won't be booting a 32-bit-only OS.

Thanks
Laszlo