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Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 21:03:45 +0300
From: Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 1/4] Add GPL bios as a submodule
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To: Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org>
Cc: Glauber Costa <glommer@gmail.com>, Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>, Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@canonical.com>, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Alex Graf <alex@csgraf.de>

Jamie Lokier wrote:
> Avi Kivity wrote:
>   
>> Let's only include seabios then and reject all patches to the bochs 
>> bios.  If that doesn't motivate people to switch, nothing will.
>>     
>
> Is there a technical reason why should people switch, other than you
> want them to?  Is Bochs BIOS broken in some difficult to fix way?
>   

bochs bios is written in 16-bit assembly and a mix of 16-bit C and 
32-bit gcc.  It requires a special toolchain (bcc/dev86), the code is 
(no disrespect to its authors) quite nasty.

seabios is mostly C (gcc, not dev86) and well written and maintained.  
No doubt you could fix the bochs bios to have these attributes, but then 
I'd ask if there is a technical reason why we should do that rather than 
switch to seabios.

-- 
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.