On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 09:19:53PM +0100, Sebastian Herbszt wrote: > Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > [snip] > >> I was ultimately able to work around the solution by deleting the >> /usr/local/share/qemu/pxe-*.bin files, but that's a bit of a botch. It >> would be nice if there was a way to disable the gPXE boot option roms; >> if you know you are booting off of a passed in hard drive image or >> passed in a kernel for a direct boot, there's no reason why we might >> want to do a gPXE boot. >> >> It would be nice if there was a way to disable option roms automatically >> if -kernel is specified, or if -boot order doesn't include 'n', or >> perhaps with an explicit option to suppress all boot option roms (or all >> networking options). >> >> What sort of approach would be considered acceptable? Did I miss >> some way of making the right thing happen other than deleting the >> installed pxe-*.bin files? > > I would suggest dropping the auto nic option rom loading and extend "-net" > with a rom option like "-net nic,model=e1000,rom=pxe-e1000.bin".
Did anyone attempt this? I noticed also with libguestfs that boot times have spiralled out of control again, and it seems to be down to the SeaBIOS change. SeaBIOS accounts for _9_ seconds of the boot sequence, up from very small (fraction of a second) for the old Bochs BIOS[1]. rm -rf /usr/share/gpxe directory reduces the SeaBIOS share of the boot time down to about 5 seconds, but that's still a huge regression compared to the old Bochs BIOS. I'm sure it's waiting for a keypress or something stupid like that. It'd be nice if the BIOS could be configured in a "just boot, dammit" mode where it avoids all interaction with keyboards, network cards, option ROMs etc. Rich. [1] Once I'd put a patch into Bochs BIOS to disable a 3 second keypress wait. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/
