Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 00/07] HVM firmware passthrough

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2012-05-02 at 00:21 +0100, Tim Deegan wrote:
> At 23:59 +0100 on 01 May (1335916778), Julian Pidancet wrote:
> > >> Would we still be able to do that with the simplifications you're
> > >> suggesting here ?
> > >
> > > Yes, you could definitely do it without all this module stuff.  Passing
> > > an address and length in Xenstore would work.
> > 
> > Isn't it kind of the same thing ? I mean, the BIOS or an Option ROM to
> > pre-load could be seen by hvmloader as "modules" because they would
> > have to be passed by the toolstack the same way as ACPI or SMBIOS
> > tables.
> 
> Yes, it's similar.  But the new module marshalling/unmarshalling code
> isn't necessary for any of them.

Agreed, if necessary then there should be specific fields in
xc_hvm_build_args to provide these overrides.

I'm not totally convinced about adding new features (specifically Option
ROM deployment support) for ROMBIOS+qemu-xen-traditional. By the time
this stuff hits the tree (i.e. 4.3 at this point) we should have
switched to SEABIOS+qemu-xen-upstream as our default BIOS+ioemu pair. It
is already the case that we have been refusing new features to
qemu-xen-traditional but we haven't yet extended this to ROMBIOS (I
don't think). I suppose the flip side is that the code ought to be small
and relatively self contained under if(rombios) conditionals in
hvmloader, so long as we make it clear in the xc interface that those
ROMs only apply if you are using ROMBIOS.

Ian.



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