On 04.08.2010, at 19:36, Anthony Liguori wrote: > On 08/04/2010 12:31 PM, Alexander Graf wrote: >> On 04.08.2010, at 19:26, Anthony Liguori wrote: >> >> >>> On 08/04/2010 11:45 AM, Alexander Graf wrote: >>> >>>> Frankly, I partially agreed to your point when we were talking about 300ms vs. 2 seconds. Now that we're talking 8 seconds that whole point is moot. We chose the wrong interface to transfer kernel+initrd data into the guest. >>>> >>>> Now the question is how to fix that. I would veto against anything normally guest-OS-visible. By occupying the floppy, you lose a floppy drive in the guest. By occupying a disk, you see an unwanted disk in the guest. >>>> >>> >>> Introduce a new virtio device type (say, id 6). Teach SeaBIOS that 6 is exactly like virtio-blk (id 2). Make it clear that id 6 is only to be used by firmware and that normal guest drivers should not be written for id 6. >>> >> Why not make id 6 be a fw_cfg virtio interface? > > Because that's a ton more work and we need fw_cfg to be available before PCI is. IOW, fw_cfg cannot be a PCI interface. in addition to fw_cfg. So you'd have the same contents be exposed using both interfaces. Alex -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html