On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 02:52:51PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > On 23/05/2015 01:23, Kevin O'Connor wrote: > > I'm curious if you've tried profiling SeaBIOS to see where it is > > spending unnecessary time? > > No, I really wanted to get the absolute minimum time needed to get to > the kernel. I announced it publicly because I think it's also instructive. > > > I wonder if a stripped down SeaBIOS could > > obtain sufficient performance. > > It most likely could. However, some of the features (e.g. booting > vmlinuz from parallel flash or, in the future, from persistent memory) > probably do not fit SeaBIOS very well. One would have to redo them > otherwise, for example using a DMA interface in fw_cfg.
I think adding vmlinuz and/or multiboot support to SeaBIOS would be generally useful (and not difficult). If a kernel was placed in memory (or memory-mapped flash) then I think it would be reasonable to have SeaBIOS obtain its address from (an unoptimized) fw_cfg and deploy it. -Kevin
