Re: [Qemu-devel] Anyone seeing huge slowdown launching qemu with Linux 2.6.35?

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

  On 08/04/2010 10:56 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
>
>>> (1) -M somethingold. PCI devices don't have a pci rom bar then by
>>> default because they didn't not have one in older qemu versions,
>>> so we need some other way to pass the option rom to seabios.
>>
>> What did we do back then? before we had the fwcfg interface?
>
> Have qemu instead of bochs/seabios manage the vgabios/optionrom area 
> (0xc8000 -> 0xe0000) and copy the roms to memory.  Which implies the 
> whole rom has to sit there as PMM can't be used then.

Do we actually need PMM for isapc?  Did PMM exist before pci?

>
>>> (3) roms not associated with a PCI device: multiboot, extboot,
>>> -option-rom command line switch, vgabios for -M isapc.
>>
>> We could lay those out in high memory (4GB-512MB) and have the bios copy
>> them from there.
>
> Yea, we could.  But it is pointless IMHO.
>
> $ ls -l *.bin
> -rwxrwxr-x. 1 kraxel kraxel 1536 Jul 15 15:51 extboot.bin*
> -rwxrwxr-x. 1 kraxel kraxel 1024 Jul 15 15:51 linuxboot.bin*
> -rwxrwxr-x. 1 kraxel kraxel 1024 Jul 15 15:51 multiboot.bin*
> -rwxrwxr-x. 1 kraxel kraxel 8960 Jul 15 15:51 vapic.bin*
>
> That are the ones we can't load via pci rom bar.  Look how small they 
> are.

So they can just sit there?  I'm confused, either there is enough 
address space and we don't need to play games, or there isn't and we do.

For playing games, there are three options:
- existing fwcfg
- fwcfg+dma
- put roms in 4GB-2MB (or whatever we decide the flash size is) and have 
the BIOS copy them

Existing fwcfg is the least amount of work and probably satisfactory for 
isapc.  fwcfg+dma is IMO going off a tangent.  High memory flash is the 
most hardware-like solution, pretty easy from a qemu point of view but 
requires more work.

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