Re: [Qemu-devel] 128Kb bios size and older machines?

[Michael Tokarev]

07.02.2014 03:56, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Il 06/02/2014 14:15, Ian Campbell ha scritto:
>> Nothing is missing in seabios.
>>
>> The above patch is a fix to Xen not SeaBIOS, which lets it work
>> correctly regardless of the size of the seabios binary.
>>
>> There is no need to do anything other than apply that fix to the Xen
>> packages (perhaps by upgrading to 4.3.1) AFAIK.
> 
> Yes, but do you use the Debian SeaBIOS build?  Wasn't SeaBIOS a blob inside 
> the Xen hvmloader binary?

In the past debian had 3 copies of qemu too -- regular qemu package,
qemu-kvm and xen-qemu.  With all the blobs and whatnot.  Now,
*finally*, we moved to just one set.  Including seabios build.

That was a miracle, when finally it weren't necessary anymore
to carry all those copies and debug each one independently,
finding and fixing the same bugs... ;)

But for now I sorted out the seabios issue in debian, by finding
the right combination of compiler and seabios config options to
produce xen-enabled but small seabios binary.  This is very
fragile still (we use 99.7% of 128Kb), but it works for now.
It'd be sad if we'll have to build another variant of seabios,
but it isn't that difficult now anyway.  Maybe it wont really
be necessary in a near future when xen in debian will be able
to use larger bios (and we'll just switch it to bios-256k.bin,
building 128kb bios without xen).

Thanks,

/mjt