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From: "Natalia Portillo" <claunia@claunia.com>
Subject: RE: [Qemu-devel] (Before) RFC for new features
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 03:41:07 +0100
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To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org

Well I didn't say about using a real commercial modular BIOS, but making the
QEMU BIOS modular as the commercial ones are.

Making the first, will be a HARD task, and, Award/AMI/Phoenix/MrBIOS won't
let us to do that.
Both VMWare and VirtualPC pays for using a commercial BIOS in their
products. 

> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: qemu-devel-bounces+iosglpgc=teleline.es@nongnu.org 
> [mailto:qemu-devel-bounces+iosglpgc=teleline.es@nongnu.org] 
> En nombre de Jim C. Brown
> Enviado el: viernes, 09 de julio de 2004 21:43
> Para: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
> Asunto: Re: [Qemu-devel] (Before) RFC for new features
> 
> On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 06:57:21PM +0100, Natalia Portillo wrote:
> > About the BIOS question we should have a modular BIOS.
> > 
> > Like AWARD, AMI, Phoenix, etc, BIOS, that have support for a great 
> > variety of chipsets and CPUs, and are compiled with 
> required modules 
> > for each motherboard.
> > 
> 
> A modular BIOS designed for qemu is ok (e.g. VGABios vs Bochs 
> BIOS vs some other hand-written BIOS) but supporting a 
> commercial BIOS written for actual hardware is another 
> matter. This is very difficult as such a BIOS will expect 
> different hardware in different places. Not to mention adding 
> support for different types of motherboards/ROM chips. Its 
> easier to just fix the current qemu BIOS.
> 
> P.S.
> 
> Someone is working on that iirc.... posted to the list a 
> while back. They loaded qemu directly from a bootloader (so 
> there was no host OS, only a guest
> OS) and did some hacking so qemu could access the host BIOS 
> directly. So it is possible, just very hard.
> 
> > > I don't think that the chipset particularly cares what extended 
> > > instructions the CPU can execute... However, BIOS support we are 
> > > definitely lacking. IIRC, the BIOS we are using doesn't 
> do any PCI 
> > > setup
> > > - so we rely on some code in pc.c and pci.c to make the 
> chipset look 
> > > configured and to set up the BARs.
> > > 
> > > --
> > > Antony T Curtis <antony.t.curtis@ntlworld.com>
> 
> --
> Infinite complexity begets infinite beauty.
> Infinite precision begets infinite perfection.
> 
> 
> 
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