Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 2/2] add fw_dir option to option-rom switch

[Glauber Costa]

On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 13:31 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On 04/12/2011 01:13 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 12:40 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> >> On 04/12/2011 12:23 PM, Glauber Costa wrote:
> >>> The option-rom puts all roms passed by this switch in the genroms 
> >>> directory,
> >>> through the fw_dir option. But as it turns out, not all roms should be 
> >>> placed there.
> >>>
> >>> VGA roms are a of a different kind. They live in a different segment, and 
> >>> are scanned
> >>> first. This patch allows qemu to use external vgaroms such as sgabios, a 
> >>> rom for a serial
> >>> graphics adapter.
> >> Wouldn't it make more sense to have a new PCI device that had sgabios
> >> that could play the role of the VGA device.
> >>
> >> Then you could say -vga sga
> >>
> >> Regards,
> > This would be good, if we included sga along the roms we ship. We're
> > still, however, left with the problem that in the future, people may
> > want to use their own roms.
> 
> Fortunately, I don't think that there are myriads of people writing 
> 16-bit option roms so I don't think this is a pressing problem :-)
For sure, but if we had this discussion a while ago, 
sgabios wouldn't exist back then, and now it does =p

> >   And the fact that not all of them should
> > live in genroms persists.
> 
> Actually genroms should disappear.  We should make -option-rom work by 
> using a dummy PCI device or something like that.

In a side track, I think sgabios is a pretty useful addition to qemu.
Would you consider including it together with the other roms ?
This would definitely increase the out-of-the box experience.

I think we don't even need to have a -vga sga switch then. Since sgabios
does not prevent output from going to the normal vga, we could always
install it, or install when there is a -serial parameter present.