Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH v2 5/5] ne2k_isa: add property for option rom loading.

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

On 10/07/09 15:28, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Having a pxe flag is somewhat odd. Real network devices always have roms
> and they always get loaded. They register themselves as BEV devices and
> the normal boot selection is used to determine whether a particular NIC
> gets network booted or not.
>
> Our roms do expose themselves as BEV roms so there's really no harm in
> loading an option rom while booting from disk.

Wrong.  Loading a pxe rom makes qemu trying to boot from it, even with 
-boot c (using the roms shipped in pc-bios/).

Maybe SeaBIOS has better BEV support and handles things differently, so 
we could load them unconditionally once we made the switch.

> Any PCI device can have a rom and it probably should be a generic
> property of any PCI device. There's really nothing specific about
> network adapters.

It's pc-specific though, so when we go the route of loading roms 
unconditionally we need to wrap that into a machine-specific helper 
function so it happes on TARGET_I386 only.

>> When making the filename configurable it should be a separate property
>> like "rom-name" or simliar. I would suggest to NOT implement it unless
>> users actually ask for it ;)
>
> Quite a few users today replace the standard etherboot roms with gPXE roms.

Usually with the same file names though, so a simple '-boot n' continues 
to work.

cheers,
   Gerd