Re: [Qemu-devel] Release plan for 0.12.0

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006@gmx.net>]

Hi Jordan,

thanks for the detailed explanation. It certainly helped me understand
some parts of the tianocore umbrealla better.

On 02.10.2009 07:37, Jordan Justen wrote:
> I work for Intel on the edk2.tianocore.org project.  (Compared to the
> original edk) edk2 may be of interest to those on this list since it
> supports building on several OS's with several different toolchains.
> In other words, it also supports building under Linux and OS X with
> the GNU compiler and binutils.
>   

Neat. I remember the toolchain issues Linux-based developers had in the
past, so I think this is a good thing.


> Within our edk2 tree, we have two projects that relate to QEMU.
>
> The DUET platform is a UEFI emulator that boots like a legacy OS on
> top of a legacy BIOS.  It contains various hardware initialization
> drivers for several legacy hardware devices, but it also will call
> into the legacy BIOS and make use of certain items from the legacy
> BIOS.  DUET can boot from the QEMU legacy BIOS, but it does require a
> disk to be setup to have the DUET image on it.  I am not sure if all
> of DUET's code is currently safe for a UEFI OS to be able to access
> UEFI runtime services.
>   

By the way, SeaBIOS can boot virtual floppy images stored in the ROM (at
least when SeaBIOS runs as coreboot payload), so if you can fit DUET
into a floppy image (or if Kevin adds support for virtual harddisk
images), you can have a coreboot+SeaBIOS+DUET ROM right now.


> The OVMF platform is a project to build a (mostly) UEFI compatible
> firmware for virtual machines.  QEMU support is one of the main goals
> for OVMF.  The OVMF rom image completely replaces QEMU's standard
> bios.bin, and therefore we must have hardware drivers for any hardware
> within the QEMU VM that we want to make use of.  The project also has
> the goal to support UEFI OS's at runtime.
>   

So OVMF is not just hardware init, but a complete package of hardware
init and UEFI interface?


Regards,
Carl-Daniel