On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 08:12:48PM +0100, Sebastian Herbszt wrote: > Anthony Liguori wrote: >> Michael S. Tsirkin wrote: >>> >>> Further, we should error out when device is added. >>> Doing this during boot is way too late, management >>> won't be able to understand such errors and >>> won't be able to recover. >>> >> >> I don't quite understand this. >> >> In 0.11, we never loaded option roms unless a user specified -boot n. >> If a user specified -boot n and used more than one nic type, I'm fairly >> certain it would error out during start up because it would run out of >> option rom space. Maybe it required three types of nics, but the point >> still remains. > > I think it used to be possible to have two different nic types and only load > one rom, e.g. -net nic,model=pcnet -net nic,model=e1000 -option-rom e1000.rom > Then use the boot menu to select the e1000 nic. > >> In 0.12, we always load the option rom for a PCI device. An easy >> solution here would be to just gracefully handle the case where we ran >> out of option rom space and (silently) stop loading additional roms. >> With respect to -boot n, it makes the behavior buggy (you cannot boot >> from the second nic) but my original point is that that is not a >> regression from 0.11. > > Even if i repeat myself [1] i suggest putting an option-rom loading flag to > the -net option: > -net nic,model=e1000,rom=[on,off,e1000.bin] > >> For 0.13, we should probably allow a user to suppress option rom >> loading for a given PCI device. The limited space is a pretty good >> justification for that. > > The default behaviour should be not loading option-roms; users should request > those. > > [1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-11/msg01095.html > > - Sebastian
I am not sure I agree. This is common for PXE and I think makes sense there, but I think this might not make sense for VGA rom or e.g. scsi. -- MST
