Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 06/01/13 01:01, Jordan Justen wrote: On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:32 AM, Gerd Hoffmann kra...@redhat.com wrote: Hi, I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, Yes. So, this is really about making coreboot+seabios the default QEMU firmware, and making seabios depend on being a coreboot payload? I still think it's better to simply have qemu generate the acpi tables, but if that isn't going to be accepted we should seriously consider evaluate switching to coreboot. load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), It wouldn't be loading OVMF. It would be loading CorebootPkg. Yep. Some OVMF bits would be needed though (virtio drivers, qemu boot priority support, ...). cheers, Gerd ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
Hi, I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, Yes. load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), The coreboot rom has named sections (this is called cbfs which stands for coreboot filesystem IIRC): rincewind kraxel ~# cbfstool /usr/share/coreboot.git/bios.bin print bios.bin: 256 kB, bootblocksize 848, romsize 262144, offset 0x0 alignment: 64 bytes Name Offset Type Size cmos_layout.bin0x0cmos_layout 1160 fallback/romstage 0x4c0 stage14419 fallback/coreboot_ram 0x3d80 stage37333 config 0xcfc0 raw 2493 fallback/payload 0xd9c0 payload 56969 vgabios/sgabios0x1b8c0raw 4096 (empty)0x1c900null 144216 where fallback/payload is seabios. and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). As far I know coreboot can add more stuff such as acpi tables to cbfs at runtime and seabios able to access cbfs too and pull informations from coreboot that way. HTH, Gerd ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 05/31/13 10:13, Peter Stuge wrote: ACPI bytes are obviously a function of QEMU configuration. Precisely! When we evaluate that (mathematical-sense) function in boot firmware, we need to retrieve the function's arguments. Those arguments are bits of QEMU configuration, as you say, and fw_cfg is extremely inconvenient for fetching them. Whenever the domain or arity of said mathematical function changes (we need more arguments, or different kinds of arguments), we have to extend fw_cfg with yet another ad-hoc key or file entry. The set of arguments going into ACPI tables *is* ad-hoc and arbitrary, there's nothing to do about it. But at least we shouldn't impede the retrieval of said arguments with artificial obstacles, such as half-assedly serializing them over fw_cfg (and not documenting them, naturally). In qemu the entire pool of arguments, current and future, would be at just an arm's length, in immediately consumable form. I've said the same about the acpi_build_madt() prototype that was proposed for qemu: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/207171/focus=208719. Thanks, Laszlo ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 09:20 -0700, Jordan Justen wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:19 AM, David Woodhouse dw...@infradead.org wrote: On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 13:13 +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote: Where is CorebootPkg available from? https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg Is the license on this actually BSD as the License.txt indicates? Is this planned to be upstreamed? Does this support UEFI variables? Does this support UEFI IA32 / X64? Those are questions for Patrick. -- dwmw2 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 2:32 AM, Gerd Hoffmann kra...@redhat.com wrote: Hi, I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, Yes. So, this is really about making coreboot+seabios the default QEMU firmware, and making seabios depend on being a coreboot payload? load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), It wouldn't be loading OVMF. It would be loading CorebootPkg. OVMF is a better sample platform for EDK II since it shows a more realistic view of what an EDK II based platform looks like on real hardware. Thus, if the ACPI tables are just being added to a new coreboot layer with coreboot becoming the default QEMU firmware, then it doesn't help OVMF (or other non-coreboot payloads). Well, it could if the table code was BSD licensed, but only so we could then merge them into OVMF. Then again, why not just provide a set of suitably licensed ACPI source files within the QEMU tree that firmware projects could use? QEMU doesn't necessarily need to build/link them, or attempt to communicate them at runtime. -Jordan The coreboot rom has named sections (this is called cbfs which stands for coreboot filesystem IIRC): rincewind kraxel ~# cbfstool /usr/share/coreboot.git/bios.bin print bios.bin: 256 kB, bootblocksize 848, romsize 262144, offset 0x0 alignment: 64 bytes Name Offset Type Size cmos_layout.bin0x0cmos_layout 1160 fallback/romstage 0x4c0 stage14419 fallback/coreboot_ram 0x3d80 stage37333 config 0xcfc0 raw 2493 fallback/payload 0xd9c0 payload 56969 vgabios/sgabios0x1b8c0raw 4096 (empty)0x1c900null 144216 where fallback/payload is seabios. and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). As far I know coreboot can add more stuff such as acpi tables to cbfs at runtime and seabios able to access cbfs too and pull informations from coreboot that way. HTH, Gerd ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
Am 31.05.2013 14:09, schrieb David Woodhouse: On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 09:20 -0700, Jordan Justen wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:19 AM, David Woodhouse dw...@infradead.org wrote: https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg Is the license on this actually BSD as the License.txt indicates? Yes. All code is either Stefan's or my own work or taken from Tiano and adapted. We will probably import some libpayload code, but that is BSD-l, too. Is this planned to be upstreamed? Yes, once it's ready. Does this support UEFI variables? Not yet, planned. Does this support UEFI IA32 / X64? Both, no mixed mode. Those are questions for Patrick. HTH, Patrick ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 05/30/13 11:23, David Woodhouse wrote: On Wed, 2013-05-29 at 11:18 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote: Certainly an option, but that is a long-term project. Out of curiousity, are there other benefits to using coreboot as a core firmware in QEMU? Is there a payload we would ever plausibly use besides OVMF and SeaBIOS? I like the idea of using Coreboot on the UEFI side — if the most actively used TianoCore platform is CorebootPkg instead of OvmfPkg, that makes it a lot easier for people using *real* hardware with Coreboot to use TianoCore. Where is CorebootPkg available from? And it helps to dispel the stupid misconception in some quarters that Coreboot *competes* with UEFI and thus cannot possibly be supported because helping something that competes with UEFI would be bad. I'm not sure who do you mean by some quarters, but for some distributions Coreboot would be yet another component (package) to support, for no obvious benefit. (Gerd said it better than I possibly could: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/5685/focus=5705.) Is there a payload we would ever plausibly use besides OVMF and SeaBIOS? For my part I want to get to the point where the default firmware shipped with qemu can be OVMF. For some distributions this is a licensing question as well. See FatBinPkg/License.txt. (The same applies if you rebuild it from source (FatPkgDev), based on FatBinPkg/ReadMe.txt.) For example Fedora can't ship OVMF because of it. If you implement a UEFI FAT driver based on Microsoft's official specification, you're bound by the same restrictions on use and redistribution. If you implement a private UEFI FAT driver from scratch, or port a free software FAT implementation (eg. the r/o one in grub or the r/w one in mtools), you could still run into legal problems, I've been told. If you rip out the FAT driver, then OVMF won't be UEFI compliant and no installer media will boot on it. Interestingly, Ubuntu has OVMF in Universe http://packages.ubuntu.com/raring/ovmf. I think they missed the FatBinPkg license (I would have missed it too, after all you have to track down the licenses of every module included in the FDF file -- it was Paolo who told me about it) and I believe they should actually ship OVMF in Multiverse or Restricted https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu. We have SeaBIOS-as-CSM working, which was one of the biggest barriers. Agreed, and I could have never done that. Thanks for implementing it with Kevin. We need at least one out-of-tree edk2 patch for now (from you) but apparently that's no problem. There are a few more things (like NV variable storage, in particular) that I need to fix before I can actually make that suggestion with a straight face though... As far as I understand: - Jordan is nearing completion of flash support on KVM, - he also has WIP NvVar storage on top of qemu flash. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/213690 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.tianocore.devel/2781/focus=2798 (Please coordinate I guess :)) Laszlo ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 01:19:18PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: Yeah, but if we're shoving a lot of hardware-specific ACPI table generation into the guest's firmware, instead of just doing it on the qemu side where a number of us seem to think it belongs, Hopefully this is not yet set in stone. then there *is* a benefit to using Coreboot. When stuff changes on the qemu side and we have to update the table generation to match, you end up having to update just the Coreboot package, and *not* having to patch both SeaBIOS and OVMF. We have all kind of logic in qemu. Some of it can thinkably be moved to a separate VM - it doesn't even need to run in the same VM as the guest - we could do it e.g. like kvm unit-test does, with less pain than running it in firmware. Not clear why would generating ACPI tables - which merely fills up an array of bytes from internal QEMU datastructures - should be the part where we start this modularization. -- MST ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 05/30/13 14:19, David Woodhouse wrote: Yeah, but if we're shoving a lot of hardware-specific ACPI table generation into the guest's firmware, instead of just doing it on the qemu side where a number of us seem to think it belongs, then there *is* a benefit to using Coreboot. When stuff changes on the qemu side and we have to update the table generation to match, you end up having to update just the Coreboot package, and *not* having to patch both SeaBIOS and OVMF. The extra package in the distro really isn't painful to handle, and I suspect it would end up *reducing* the amount of work that we have to do to update. You update *just* Coreboot, not *both* of SeaBIOS and OVMF. I can't deny there's logic in that, but it still feels like tying ourselves up in some intricate bondage choreography. We'd like to move ACPI tables out of firmware, but we can't move them to qemu due to project direction disagreement, so let's adopt a middleman. (I'm not trying to denigrate coreboot -- I don't know it at all --, but introducing it in a (granted, distro-specific) stack just for this purpose seems quite arbitrary.) If you implement a private UEFI FAT driver from scratch, or port a free software FAT implementation (eg. the r/o one in grub or the r/w one in mtools), you could still run into legal problems, I've been told. That has been said, and it's been said for the FAT implementation in the kernel too. If a distribution is happy to ship the kernel without ripping out its FAT support, then I see no reason why that distribution wouldn't also be happy to ship a version of OVMF with a clean implementation of FAT support. It doesn't make sense to be happy with one but not the other. Under my *personal* impression, logic and Common Law don't really mix, especially not in the US. Still under my *personal* impression, someone might not feel convenient suing you for redistributing code that already exists in the upstream Linux kernel, but might happily drag you to court for an original clean implementation, and then you can explain it's illogical for them to do so. The best I can do with your suggestion is to take it to our legal dept. I would be happy to work on a new FAT driver. (I used to feel differently earlier but I've changed my mind.) We need at least one out-of-tree edk2 patch for now (from you) but apparently that's no problem. That'll get merged soon. We are working on the corresponding spec update... Great news! Thanks, Laszlo ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 13:13 +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote: Where is CorebootPkg available from? https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg And it helps to dispel the stupid misconception in some quarters that Coreboot *competes* with UEFI and thus cannot possibly be supported because helping something that competes with UEFI would be bad. I'm not sure who do you mean by some quarters, but for some distributions Coreboot would be yet another component (package) to support, for no obvious benefit. (Gerd said it better than I possibly could: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/5685/focus=5705.) Yeah, but if we're shoving a lot of hardware-specific ACPI table generation into the guest's firmware, instead of just doing it on the qemu side where a number of us seem to think it belongs, then there *is* a benefit to using Coreboot. When stuff changes on the qemu side and we have to update the table generation to match, you end up having to update just the Coreboot package, and *not* having to patch both SeaBIOS and OVMF. The extra package in the distro really isn't painful to handle, and I suspect it would end up *reducing* the amount of work that we have to do to update. You update *just* Coreboot, not *both* of SeaBIOS and OVMF. If you implement a private UEFI FAT driver from scratch, or port a free software FAT implementation (eg. the r/o one in grub or the r/w one in mtools), you could still run into legal problems, I've been told. That has been said, and it's been said for the FAT implementation in the kernel too. If a distribution is happy to ship the kernel without ripping out its FAT support, then I see no reason why that distribution wouldn't also be happy to ship a version of OVMF with a clean implementation of FAT support. It doesn't make sense to be happy with one but not the other. We need at least one out-of-tree edk2 patch for now (from you) but apparently that's no problem. That'll get merged soon. We are working on the corresponding spec update... As far as I understand: - Jordan is nearing completion of flash support on KVM, - he also has WIP NvVar storage on top of qemu flash. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/213690 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.tianocore.devel/2781/focus=2798 (Please coordinate I guess :)) Ooh, shiny. Yeah, when I get back to actually working on it rather than just heckling, I'll make sure I do :) -- dwmw2 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:19 AM, David Woodhouse dw...@infradead.org wrote: On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 13:13 +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote: Where is CorebootPkg available from? https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg Is the license on this actually BSD as the License.txt indicates? Is this planned to be upstreamed? Does this support UEFI variables? Does this support UEFI IA32 / X64? And it helps to dispel the stupid misconception in some quarters that Coreboot *competes* with UEFI and thus cannot possibly be supported because helping something that competes with UEFI would be bad. Coreboot and EDK II both provide a good infrastructure for initializing hardware. So, they compete on that point. Coreboot then focuses on booting coreboot payloads, while EDK II focuses on UEFI support. On that point they don't compete, but the focus is different. Of course, you can build a layer of EDK II = Coreboot payload support, or Coreboot = EDK II (CorebootPkg, I guess?), but the match will not be perfect. (That is not to say it can't work.) I'm not sure who do you mean by some quarters, but for some distributions Coreboot would be yet another component (package) to support, for no obvious benefit. (Gerd said it better than I possibly could: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/5685/focus=5705.) Yeah, but if we're shoving a lot of hardware-specific ACPI table generation into the guest's firmware, instead of just doing it on the qemu side where a number of us seem to think it belongs, then there *is* a benefit to using Coreboot. When stuff changes on the qemu side and we have to update the table generation to match, you end up having to update just the Coreboot package, and *not* having to patch both SeaBIOS and OVMF. I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? -Jordan ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 05/30/13 18:20, Jordan Justen wrote: I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). This could introduce another interface (fw_cfg+something rather than just fw_cfg), but ACPI table preparation would be concentrated in one project. I guess. Laszlo ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Laszlo Ersek ler...@redhat.com wrote: On 05/30/13 18:20, Jordan Justen wrote: I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). This could introduce another interface (fw_cfg+something rather than just fw_cfg), but ACPI table preparation would be concentrated in one project. I guess. For reference, I believe that both Xen and virtualbox build ACPI table in the VMM rather than firmware. They both dump the tables into the 0xe000 segment (yuck) where firmware finds and publishes it to the OS. I think fw-cfg would be a reasonable alternative to this for communicating the tables. -Jordan ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On 05/30/13 18:57, Jordan Justen wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Laszlo Ersek ler...@redhat.com wrote: On 05/30/13 18:20, Jordan Justen wrote: I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). This could introduce another interface (fw_cfg+something rather than just fw_cfg), but ACPI table preparation would be concentrated in one project. I guess. For reference, I believe that both Xen and virtualbox build ACPI table in the VMM rather than firmware. They both dump the tables into the 0xe000 segment (yuck) where firmware finds and publishes it to the OS. I think fw-cfg would be a reasonable alternative to this for communicating the tables. I think Xen uses a separate utility called hvmloader that runs in the domU. - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/5453/focus=5668 - http://xenbits.xen.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=tree;f=tools/firmware/hvmloader - http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/6255/focus=110562 Laszlo ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 09:20:42AM -0700, Jordan Justen wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 5:19 AM, David Woodhouse dw...@infradead.org wrote: On Thu, 2013-05-30 at 13:13 +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote: Where is CorebootPkg available from? https://github.com/pgeorgi/edk2/tree/coreboot-pkg Is the license on this actually BSD as the License.txt indicates? Is this planned to be upstreamed? Does this support UEFI variables? Does this support UEFI IA32 / X64? And it helps to dispel the stupid misconception in some quarters that Coreboot *competes* with UEFI and thus cannot possibly be supported because helping something that competes with UEFI would be bad. Coreboot and EDK II both provide a good infrastructure for initializing hardware. So, they compete on that point. Coreboot then focuses on booting coreboot payloads, while EDK II focuses on UEFI support. On that point they don't compete, but the focus is different. Of course, you can build a layer of EDK II = Coreboot payload support, or Coreboot = EDK II (CorebootPkg, I guess?), but the match will not be perfect. (That is not to say it can't work.) I'm not sure who do you mean by some quarters, but for some distributions Coreboot would be yet another component (package) to support, for no obvious benefit. (Gerd said it better than I possibly could: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.coreboot.seabios/5685/focus=5705.) Yeah, but if we're shoving a lot of hardware-specific ACPI table generation into the guest's firmware, instead of just doing it on the qemu side where a number of us seem to think it belongs, then there *is* a benefit to using Coreboot. When stuff changes on the qemu side and we have to update the table generation to match, you end up having to update just the Coreboot package, and *not* having to patch both SeaBIOS and OVMF. I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. Of course ACPI tables are firmware. Please note that what my patches do is simply supply templates for ACPI tables on a ROM device separate from where bios code resides. bios still tweaks them in minor ways. I am guessing this is what happens on real hardware too: most tables pre-generated in ROM, firmware shadows them and tweaks them in minor ways. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? -Jordan ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
Re: [SeaBIOS] [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28
On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 09:57:10AM -0700, Jordan Justen wrote: On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Laszlo Ersek ler...@redhat.com wrote: On 05/30/13 18:20, Jordan Justen wrote: I think ACPI table generation lives in firmware on real products, because on real products the firmware is the point that best understands the actual hardware layout for the machine. In qemu, I would say that qemu best knows the hardware layout, given that the firmware is generally a slightly separate project from qemu. I don't think adding a coreboot layer into the picture helps, if it brings along the coreboot payload boot interface as a requirement. Then again, I don't really understand how firmware could be swapped out in this case. What would -bios do? How would the coreboot ACPI shim layer be specified to qemu? I guess -bios would load coreboot. Coreboot would siphon the data necessary for ACPI table building through the current (same) fw_cfg bottleneck, build the tables, load the boot firmware (SeaBIOS or OVMF or something else -- not sure how to configure that), and pass down the tables to the firmware (through a now unspecified interface -- perhaps the tables could even be installed at this point). This could introduce another interface (fw_cfg+something rather than just fw_cfg), but ACPI table preparation would be concentrated in one project. I guess. For reference, I believe that both Xen and virtualbox build ACPI table in the VMM rather than firmware. They both dump the tables into the 0xe000 segment (yuck) where firmware finds and publishes it to the OS. I think fw-cfg would be a reasonable alternative to this for communicating the tables. -Jordan Want to review/ack the patches I sent? That's exactly what they do. -- MST ___ SeaBIOS mailing list SeaBIOS@seabios.org http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
