Paul Brook wrote: > On Tuesday 17 November 2009, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > >> On 11/17/09 13:36, Paul Brook wrote: >> >>>>> In fact I'd much prefer to see extboot rewritten to just virtio-block. >>>>> >>>> Hmm, I'd prefer something which is *not* used by the guest OS, so it is >>>> a pure bootloader thing. When using it to boot from scsi you don't want >>>> to have the disk show up twice (as virtio and scsi) in the guest. >>>> >>> You're assuming noone ever writes OS support for extboot... >>> >> Which would be almost as silly as writing OS support for bios-int13 ... >> > > Not entirely. int13 is a software interface, extboot is a hardware interface. > Look at it the other way round: If I already have my low performance boot > device exposed via extboot (on an otherwise diskless client), why should I > have to also expose it via virtio-blk just so that the guest can access it > for > installing kernel upgrades. >
Because that's not what you'd use it for. That's what -kernel and -initrd are there for. IMHO having a BIOS backdoor is a good thing in general. If anyone wants to destroy their user experience by writing a driver for that in their OS, I'm good with that, but let's not expose things twice _to users_ as the default case. Alex
