Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Add BIOS splash image support

[Jan Kiszka <jan.kiszka@siemens.com>]

Gleb Natapov wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 02:45:38PM +0100, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>> Paul Brook wrote:
>>>>> Modern BIOSes have splash screens.  I don't see why our BIOS shouldn't
>>>>> have one too.
>>>> Crap PC BIOSes have splash screens because they're horribly slow
>>>> and otherwise printing lots of irrelevant scary junk at users. The
>>>> best BIOS 'splash' screen is one which never appears unless there
>>>> is a boot failure, and gets control to the OS as quickly as possible.
>>>> IMHO a better goal is reducing the time until the OS / bootloader is
>>>> able to take over all management of the display.
>>> I agree. The qemu bios init process takes almost no time.
>>>
>>> The only reason it takes a noticeable amount of time is that we have a 
>>> deliberate delay in there to allow the user to access the boot menu.
>>> I'm not convinced this menu is actually very useful in practice, It's 
>>> something that should probably be delegated to your management utility and/or 
>>> be optional.
>> Yes, please. I hate this artificial delay, specifically as I have to do
>> a lot of short boot tests where this contributes noticeably to their
>> execution time. But, as usual, it didn't hurt enough to make me hack a
>> patch yet. I'm willing to do this if we can agree on how it should be done.
>>
> Add "-bootmenu" option to qmeu and pass it to BIOS via fw confing interface?

Sounds good to me. Qemu bits are already done, but now I'm stuck on
setting up the bochs bios environment. Probably I'm blind, but I can't
find a proper reference, telling me against which version the qemu bios
patch is. Currently, it does not apply against bochs CVS head.

BTW, why does qemu not carry all bochs bios source? For reference, but
also to fully comply with the LGPL (pointing to the original source is
not sufficient when delivering binaries - like e.g. bios.bin...).

Jan

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