On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 10:50:59AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > I understand from the git logs that fw_cfg was added because the old > way was to load kernel & initrd into RAM directly, but this didn't > work because SeaBIOS would clear the RAM, clobbering kernel & initrd. > Could we change to loading these directly into RAM, and instead > provide some indication to SeaBIOS so it doesn't clobber the RAM? I'm > quite prepared to do the work, just wondering if there's something > else I'm not getting about this.
Or thinking around the subject: Change fw_cfg so that you send a command + a physical address, and fw_cfg memcpy's the kernel / initrd / etc to that physical address. Then linuxboot.bin doesn't have to do the manual copying. Or just change linuxboot.bin so it does 32 bit inl instructions, which might at least be a bit faster ... Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top
