Hello, I was attempting to get GRUB to be able to communicate over its network stack for i386-pc inside Qemu to develop some additional GRUB network protocol tests. I wasn't able to get this working... it seems the simulated BIOS needs to have PXE supported and enabled for GRUB to be able to communicate in this scenario.
Based on this, I was considering writing a minimal GRUB network driver for virtio-net to allow GRUB to communicate over the network in Qemu. Some helpful info on virtio-net can be seen here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/deep-dive-virtio-networking-and-vhost-net The specification is here (for minimal virtio-net driver requirements): https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.2/cs01/virtio-v1.2-cs01.html#x1-6700004 It may require a virtio PCI driver as well, but I'm not sure about this yet... I'd like to avoid this if possible. Thoughts on this topic (if there is support / interest): 1. There are some -qemu targets today, so I'd expect it'd make sense to include this new driver for those targets only (possibly a qemu osdep?). It may be possible to expand this to cover other targets as well as long as I can avoid any Qemu / KVM build time dependencies if this is desirable. 2. I wasn't able to find a GPL 3.0+ virtio-net reference driver so I'd plan to write this from scratch based on the spec 3. This may help some knowledgeable users of GRUB wishing to test network aspects in Qemu, but my main use-case is mostly to enable building / creating additional network tests I can run inside Qemu. Please let me know your thoughts. Sincerely, Andrew Hamilton _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
