[Qemu-devel] Re: [SeaBIOS] [RFC] Passing boot order from qemu to seabios

[Gleb Natapov <gleb@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 05:42:30PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
>  On 10/11/2010 05:39 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> >On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 05:09:22PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> >>   On 10/11/2010 12:18 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
> >>  >Currently if VM is started with multiple disks it is almost impossible to
> >>  >guess which one of them will be used as boot device especially if there
> >>  >is a mix of ATA/virtio/SCSI devices. Essentially BIOS decides the order
> >>  >and without looking into the code you can't tell what the order will
> >>  >be (and in qemu-kvm if boot=on is used it brings even more havoc). We
> >>  >should allow fine-grained control of boot order from qemu command line,
> >>  >or as a minimum control what device will be used for booting.
> >>  >
> >>  >To do that along with inventing syntax to specify boot order on qemu
> >>  >command line we need to communicate boot order to seabios via fw_cfg
> >>  >interface. For that we need to have a way to unambiguously specify a
> >>  >disk from qemu to seabios.  PCI bus address is not enough since not all
> >>  >devices are PCI (do we care about them?) and since one PCI device may
> >>  >control more then one disk (ATA slave/master, SCSI LUNs). We can do what
> >>  >EDD specification does. Describe disk as:
> >>  >      bus type (isa/pci),
> >>  >      address on a bus (16 bit base address for isa, b/s/f for pci)
> >>  >      device type (ATA/SCSI/VIRTIO)
> >>  >      device path (slave/master for ATA, LUN for SCSI, nothing for virtio)
> >>  >
> >>  >Will it cover all use cased? Any other ideas? Any ideas about qemu
> >>  >command line syntax? May be somebody whats to implement it? :)
> >>
> >>  Instead of fwcfg, we should store the boot order in the bios.  This
> >>  allows seabios to implement persistent boot selection and control
> >>  boot order from within the guest.
> >>
> >It is not "instead of" it is in a best case "in addition too". First of
> >all seabios does not have persistent storage currently and second I much
> >prefer specifying boot device from command line instead of navigating
> >bios menus. That what we have to do on real HW because there is not
> >other way to do it, but in virtualization we can do better.
> 
> Ok.  So fwcfg will have an option "do your default thing" which the
> bios can take as a hint to look in cmos memory.
> 
Definitely. If qemu does not provide any info about boot order default
logic should be used.

--
			Gleb.