Re: Fast/Quiet Boot

[Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@amd.com>]

the uni wrote:
> Heavy finger, disregard last message...
> 
> I've been testing the new Moblin distro from linux, and it boots
> incredibly quickly (~7 secs to desktop in KVM)
> 
> One irritation is that the bios takes up roughly half of that time.
> I've managed to throw in a few ifdefs into the bios/vgabios to
> get the screen cleared and the prompts to go away so that the first
> thing that you see after KVM is launched is an xfce desktop.
> 
> This is a vast improvement in my opinion, but obviously one that's not
> always wanted/needed.
> 
> It makes sense to me that if a --boot or --kernel parameter is given,
> that the "press f12 for boot menu..." should not be shown.
> Moreover, I think it makes sense to show no bios messages at all if
> --kernel is given. This improves boot time by ~3 secs
> on my machine, meaning I get a moblin xfce desktop in ~4 secs.
> 
> So here's my question: Is it posible to send a parameter to the bios?
> I'd like to change the bios operation for the 2 parameters above, but
> haven't found a way to do it.
Are you looking for the firmware configuration interface?
Look at bios/rombios32.c for functions qemu_cfg_* and constants 
QEMU_CFG_* for the BIOS side of the game and qemu/hw/fw_cfg.[ch] for the 
QEMU interface side (functions here are prefixed with fw_cfg_). So 
define a new channel and send your data over. Be sure to consider 
qemu-devel if you want to send patches.

Hope that helps,
Andre.

-- 
Andre Przywara
AMD-Operating System Research Center (OSRC), Dresden, Germany
Tel: +49 351 277-4917
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