Re: [Qemu-devel] multiple boot devices

[J. Mayer]

On Sat, 2007-11-03 at 01:18 +0000, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> J. Mayer wrote:
> [snip]
> > > > It restricts the letter to the ones historically allowed by Qemu, not to
> > > > anything specific to any architecture or hw platform. What I like in my
> > > > implementation, compared to the strchr..., is that it exactly tells the
> > > > user which given device is incorrect.
> > > 
> > > Well, here it makes no difference, strchr tells you exactly same as much.
> > 
> > Yes, you're right. Was thinking about the original strspn.
> > 
> > > Instead of the check, the code could also allow everything from 'a' to
> > > 'z' and then just AND the produced 32bit bitmap with a machine defined
> > > bitmap that would be part of QEMUMachine.
> > 
> > I guess we would better stop at 'n', because we can easily define a
> > semantic for devices 'c' to 'm' (ie hard disk drives in a hardware
> > platform specific order) but we have to define what means 'o' to 'z'.
> > But I agree we would better extend it now, instead of having to rework
> > it later...
> 
> To select the network device to boot from would probably become a
> 'n' 'o' 'p' 'q' series.
> 
> [snip]
> > > > Here's a second pass cleanup, adding the machine dependant checks for
> > > > the PC machine and the PowerPC ones. As one can see, the OpenHack'Ware
> > > > firmware is able to boot from devices 'e' and 'f'. For the PowerPC
> > > > machines, I choosed to try to boot from the first given usable device,
> > > > some may not agree with this choice. It can be noticed that the
> > > > available boot devices are not the same for PowerPC PreP, g3bw and mac99
> > > > machines.
> > > > As I don't know the features and requirements for the other
> > > > architectures, I prefered not to add any check for those ones.
> > > 
> > > Most other machines ignore -boot and those that don't, shouldn't break
> > > from the introduced change, so please commit it when you feel ok with
> > > it.
> > 
> > I'd like to know what are the feelings around about this patch and if
> > there are specific requirements and/or problems for some platforms to be
> > addressed before...
> 
> I think the proposed scheme (and the implementation) is flexible enough
> to accomodate all relevant platforms.

Here's an updated patch that address the remark about network boot
devices.

-- 
J. Mayer <address@hidden>
Never organized

boot_devices.diff
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