Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 1/4] Add GPL bios as a submodule

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Stanislav wrote:
>> What does Coreboot give us over seabios?
>>     
>
> You asking :)
>
> - It is much better maintained and sponsored by technology leaders (IBM,
> AMD, Intel).
>   

Take a look at who has been contributing to patches to the Bochs BIOS 
lately via QEMU :-)

>   Also as I understood some of bios stuff is patented, IBM bought these
> patents and contributed them to Coreboot project.
>   

Can you point me to specific information about this?

> - I expect it will do support all recent stuff (new ACPI specs, UEFI and
> etc) much faster than seabios.
>   

I find this very unlikely.  I don't think coreboot bothers with things 
like building ACPI tables.  Why would it have to when it has a full 
Linux environment?

Also, I find it very unlikely that it would bother support uefi 
interfaces.  Maybe provide tiano core as a payload but we could always 
just use tiano core on top of QEMU directly.  The problem with uefi is 
that you still need a CSM to support 99% of guests out there which means 
that you would still need a seabios module for tiano core.

> - It is written for real modern hardware as well so it is validated on real
> life as well.
>   

It's a neat project and I think it's valuable to make it more easily 
used in QEMU, but I don't think it can replace our existing BIOS.  I 
also don't think that that's its general mission statement either.  I 
think its primary purpose is to eliminate all the legacy firmware junk 
and provide the quickest and most featureful environment for large clusters.

>> Doesn't Coreboot use seabios for legacy OS?
>>     
>
> No idea ...
>   

It does.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori