Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: Need a way disable gPXE boot

["Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 09:19:53PM +0100, Sebastian Herbszt wrote:
> Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>> I was ultimately able to work around the solution by deleting the
>> /usr/local/share/qemu/pxe-*.bin files, but that's a bit of a botch.  It
>> would be nice if there was a way to disable the gPXE boot option roms;
>> if you know you are booting off of a passed in hard drive image or
>> passed in a kernel for a direct boot, there's no reason why we might
>> want to do a gPXE boot.
>>
>> It would be nice if there was a way to disable option roms automatically
>> if -kernel is specified, or if -boot order doesn't include 'n', or
>> perhaps with an explicit option to suppress all boot option roms (or all
>> networking options).
>>
>> What sort of approach would be considered acceptable?  Did I miss
>> some way of making the right thing happen other than deleting the
>> installed pxe-*.bin files?
>
> I would suggest dropping the auto nic option rom loading and extend "-net"
> with a rom option like "-net nic,model=e1000,rom=pxe-e1000.bin".

Did anyone attempt this?

I noticed also with libguestfs that boot times have spiralled out of
control again, and it seems to be down to the SeaBIOS change.  SeaBIOS
accounts for _9_ seconds of the boot sequence, up from very small
(fraction of a second) for the old Bochs BIOS[1].

rm -rf /usr/share/gpxe directory reduces the SeaBIOS share of the boot
time down to about 5 seconds, but that's still a huge regression
compared to the old Bochs BIOS.

I'm sure it's waiting for a keypress or something stupid like that.
It'd be nice if the BIOS could be configured in a "just boot, dammit"
mode where it avoids all interaction with keyboards, network cards,
option ROMs etc.

Rich.

[1] Once I'd put a patch into Bochs BIOS to disable a 3 second
keypress wait.

-- 
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