Re: [Qemu-devel] Recent SeaBIOS too big for QEMU -initrd

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 11:27:41AM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> The QEMU -initrd option loads the initrd at the top of RAM.  There is
>> a 64 KB safety region for ACPI tables in hw/i386/pc.c:load_linux():
>>
>>   initrd_max = max_ram_size-ACPI_DATA_SIZE-1;
>>
>> QEMU's bios-256k.bin SeaBIOS build reserves 128 KB at the top of
>> memory so the 64 KB ACPI data size has become too small.
>>
>> The guest Linux kernel rejects the initrd:
>> BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
>>  BIOS-e820: 0000000000010000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
>>  BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
>>  BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
>>  BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000003ffe0000 (usable)
>>  BIOS-e820: 000000003ffe0000 - 0000000040000000 (reserved)
>>  BIOS-e820: 00000000feffc000 - 00000000ff000000 (reserved)
>>  BIOS-e820: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
>> ...
>> initrd extends beyond end of memory (0x3ffef79f > 0x3ffe0000)
>> disabling initrd
>>
>> It is easy enough to "fix" the problem by bumping ACPI_DATA_SIZE up to
>> 0x20000 in QEMU.  Perhaps this should only be done for bios-256k.bin
>> guests and not bios-128k.bin guests (QEMU 1.7 and older machine
>> types).
>>
>> Perhaps QEMU -> SeaBIOS -> linuxboot.bin can be simplified so QEMU
>> doesn't have to guess what e820 region SeaBIOS will reserve.
>> linuxboot.bin would probably be the place to do it unless SeaBIOS has
>> Linux loading functionality that could be reused.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>>
>> Stefan
>
> I would say 2.1 and up, -M pc-i440fx-2.0 works fine, or am I mistaken?

pc-i440fx-2.0 works fine.  pc-i440fx-2.1 does not.

Stefan