Re: [PATCH 00/07] HVM firmware passthrough

[Julian Pidancet <julian.pidancet@gmail.com>]

On 03/22/12 11:26, Tim Deegan wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> At 09:24 +0000 on 20 Mar (1332235452), Tim Deegan wrote:
>> My impression from the earlier discussions is that we're pasing largish
>> blobs of binary BIOS goop around, which aren't suitable to go into
>> xenstore.  Dropping them in memory where HVMloader can pick them up
>> seems reasonable.
>>
>> All the control-path stuff - what the blobs are, where they are &c,
>> should go through Xenstore, though.
> 
> So having looked at the code, I think the module system is really
> overkill - AIUI all the things you're talking about passing through are
> ACPI tables, which have their own length fields internally.  So all
> you'd need to do is have a type code and an address in xenstore
> somewhere, the same way we pass a type code and a string for the other
> BIOS customizations.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tim.

Hi,

I don't think ACPI and SMBIOS firmware passthrough are the only use
cases here.

The module architecture could also be used to pass the BIOS and Option
ROMs to hvmloader. The toolstack could load them from dom0's filesystem
dynamically and pass them to hvmloader, instead of having them
compiled-in statically in hvmloader.

Would we still be able to do that with the simplifications you're
suggesting here ?

-- 
Julian