From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:45630) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aOjfi-0006Pf-4x for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2016 05:19:29 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aOjfe-00037a-7I for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2016 05:19:26 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:58904) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aOjfe-00037Q-2U for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Thu, 28 Jan 2016 05:19:22 -0500 Message-ID: <1453976359.30975.39.camel@redhat.com> From: Gerd Hoffmann Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2016 11:19:19 +0100 In-Reply-To: References: <59b02541da838ce9a0246178deb3c377109589bb.1447780013.git.crobinso@redhat.com> <1453818064.24277.29.camel@redhat.com> <56A8C0BD.4080406@ipxe.org> <1453902575.14828.23.camel@redhat.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Mime-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [ipxe-devel] [PATCH ipxe] build: Enable IPv6 for qemu List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: Christian Nilsson Cc: ipxe-devel@ipxe.org, Michael Brown , qemu-devel@nongnu.org Hi, > How common is it to build EFI roms, compared to building ipxe.efi or > snponly.efi? No idea. qemu is a very specific case, ipxe has drivers for the qemu nics (both virtual such as virtio-net and emulated such as rtl8139), and right now we actually build ipxe tree times (bios, efi-ia32, efi-x86_64), then combine them into a single image, using EfiRom (shipped with edk2). That image is populated to the guest via pci rom bar. That way both seabios and ovmf (edk2 firmware for qemu) have drivers available. How much bios vs. efi is used -- I don't know. seabios is the default and has been for years, so it is pretty clear that seabios takes the lead. But whenever uefi share is at 1% or 10% -- no idea. Probably we'll go add efi-aarch64 roms to the mix once ipxe support is there, or maybe drop efi-ia32 in favor of efi-aarch64. > On IRC, roms is quite rare topic compared to non rom builds, but maybe > that's because those that build roms don't have that many questions. I suspect it is because it rarely happens. For onboard nics there simply is no rom you can easily populate. Instead the nic rom is stored in the firmware flash, together with bios/uefi. Chainloading ipxe.efi is *alot* simpler than hacking your firmware flash. Add-on cards are a different story of course, but I suspect >90% of the use cases are with onboard nics. The only case where I personally had a ipxe rom running on physical hardware was when I flashed a T60 Thinkpad (hardware broke meanwhile) with coreboot. qemu has a defined set of hardware and prebuilt roms are shipped with both qemu and distros. So people rarely have to build qemu roms themself -> no irc questions either ;) cheers, Gerd