On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 01:17:23PM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote: > >Does any OS (Windows?) depend on the tables the bios creates (e.g. > >smbios) > >for licensing? It would be ugly if Windows wants you to > >re-activate after a reboot > >following a migration to newer qemu version and therefore possibly > >changed tables > >due to newer bios. > > Yes, and this is a good point. ACPI table changes can absolutely > cause re-activation. If we migrate from 0.12 -> 0.13 and make major > changes to the ACPI tables in 0.13, then it's very likely that will > result in problems for Windows guests. > On the contrary. This is very unlikely. Otherwise BIOS upgrade would cause Windows reactivation.
> I really think that we need to snapshot the FW and store it with the > guest state. If we switch all FW to be allocated with > qemu_ram_alloc() and we use an id mechanism, then this will Just > Work for savevm based snapshots and live migration. However, for it > to work with -M pc-0.11 started from a cold boot, we need an nvram > file. We probably want to make available versioned nvram files from > each release too. > Yes, firmware should be part of machine description. -- Gleb.