Re: [Qemu-devel] [PULL] RISC-V QEMU Port Submission v8

[Michael Clark]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 10:13 PM, Andrea Bolognani <address@hidden>
wrote:

> On Tue, 2018-03-06 at 14:30 +1300, Michael Clark wrote:
> > I'm currently working on some changes locally to split the firmware from
> > the kernel image. Currently the kernel image is embedded in the firmware
> (r
> > iscv-pk/bbl).
>
> I was wondering about this just yesterday.
>
> Will this eventually lead to a situation where we can have a single
> firmware image which is shared between all guests, a la OVMF/AAVMF,
> with grub and the kernels stored on the virtual disk itself, like
> on most other architectures?
>

Possibly.

My first cut is to put the kernel-entry load address into a "chosen"
device-tree node so that the firmware knows where to jump to, versus having
the kernel as an embedded payload.

Currently the kernel image is embedded inside of the riscv-pk/bbl firmware
which is less than ideal and obviously a temporary solution.

We want to be able to build the firmware, kernel and initramfs separately.

That should make it less awkward to add RISC-V support to libvirt,
> plus I expect it to be kind of a requirement for full distribution
> support, especially when it comes to updates and such.
>

Apparently some folk have spent some time working on UEFI support for
RISC-V and I noticed that there is a UEFI model for passing FDT (versus
other platform specific tables).

The only thing I don't like about UEFI is that it uses LLP64 and PE/COFF vs
LP64/ELF