Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH RFC 0/3] seabios: move acpi table formatting out of bios

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 07:01:13PM -0400, Kevin O'Connor wrote:
> On Tue, May 07, 2013 at 09:00:48PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:02:20PM +0300, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > > Untested yet, but I thought I'd share the
> > > BIOS bits so we can agree on direction.
> > > 
> > > In particular check out ROM sizes:
> > > - Before patchset with DSDT enabled
> > >     Total size: 127880  Fixed: 59060  Free: 3192 (used 97.6% of 128KiB rom)
> > > - Before patchset with DSDT disabled
> > >     Total size: 122844  Fixed: 58884  Free: 8228 (used 93.7% of 128KiB rom)
> > > - After patchset:
> > >     Total size: 128776  Fixed: 59100  Free: 2296 (used 98.2% of 128KiB rom)
> > > - Legacy disabled at build time:
> > >     Total size: 119836  Fixed: 58996  Free: 11236 (used 91.4% of 128KiB rom)
> > > 
> > > As can be seen from this, most size savings come
> > > from dropping DSDT, but we do save a bit by removing
> > > other tables. Of course the real reason to move tables to QEMU
> > > is so that ACPI can better match hardware.
> > > 
> > > This patchset adds an option to move all code for formatting acpi tables
> > > out of BIOS. With this, QEMU has full control over the table layout.
> > > All tables are loaded from the new "/etc/acpi/" directory.
> > > Any entries in this directory cause BIOS to disable
> > > ACPI table generation completely.
> > > A generic linker script, controlled by QEMU, is
> > > loaded from "/etc/linker-script". It is used to
> > > patch in table pointers and checksums.
> > 
> > After some thought, there are two additional
> > options worth considering, in that they simplify
> > bios code somewhat:
> > 
> > - bios could get size from qemu, allocate a buffer
> >   (e.g. could be one buffer for all tables)
> >   and pass the address to qemu.
> >   qemu does all the patching
> > 
> > - further, qemu could do the copy of tables into
> >   that address directly
> 
> This seems more complex than necessary to me.
> 
> The important task is to get the tables generated in QEMU - I'd focus
> on getting the tables generated in QEMU (one table per fw_cfg "file").
> Once that is done, the SeaBIOS side can be easily implemented, and we
> can add any enhancements on top if we feel it is necessary.
> 
> -Kevin

I have kind of done this, though only compile-tested
for now - still need to update the bios with the new
linker interface along the lines suggested by you.

If you want to see how the code looks like check out

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/virt/kvm/mst/qemu.git acpi
the code is in
hw/i386/acpi-build.c
and
hw/i386/bios-linker-loader.c

the history is all messed up now, I'll clean it up shortly.

That said, this uses fw_cfg so for this to be acceptable,
we need to fix migration with big fw_cfg files.

-- 
MST