Re: [RFC] [PATCH] HVM SMBIOS support 1/6

["Andrew D. Ball" <aball@us.ibm.com>]

On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 19:34 +0100, Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 11 Jul 2006, at 19:12, Andrew D. Ball wrote:
> 
> > Do you see any other things to work on for the SMBIOS patches?  Making
> > SMBIOS not optional cuts down on a bit of the code, so I'm working on
> > that and getting the code to run on the latest changeset today.
> 
> I think they're basically okay. I find it a bit weird that hvmloader 
> puts SMBIOS tables in a fixed place and then rombios copies them -- not 
> sure why that's needed but I suppose you're only copying what is done 
> for ACPI tables. Couldn't hvmloader write all BIOS tables to a safe 
> location and be done with them, or is the problem that 0xf0000 upwards 
> is not available at the time hvmloader runs? 

More or less.  0xf0000-0xfffff is reserved for the ROMBIOS, but I need a
31-bit entry point somewhere on a 16-byte boundary there.  It's only the
31-bit entry point that gets copied.

> Also, is the e820 
> reservation entry actually valid: 0x9f000-0xA0000 is reserved, but 
> rombios copies the tables out of that area, right? Does rombios also 
> update the e820 table?

I'm a little confused about this myself.  Whenever I change the e820 map
in libxenguest, it seems to work, but I see two other places that might
change it

(1) copy_e820_table in rombios.c -- looks like this doesn't do anything
if 0x91e8 is 0, which is probably the case.
(2) some code in vmxassist's setup.c -- looks like this has a copy of
the same e820map defined in xc_hvm_build.c and only changes it if TEST
is defined.

Thanks for your help!
Andrew

> 
>   -- Keir
> 
> 
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