Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/6] Add UUID command-line option

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 04:35:00PM +0300, Blue Swirl wrote:
> I'd still prefer to use a memory mapped interface, but I was told that
> this would not be easy to access from 16 bit code. It's equally
> possible to make the ROM indexed even on Sparc32 or maybe even add a
> hidden m48t59 to PC.

The bochs bios code that produces the acpi and smbios tables runs in
32bit mode.  So, I'm not sure why 16bit mode would matter.

As an aside, I recently ported the bochs bios to gcc - I call the
result SeaBIOS.  (Binaries are available at
http://linuxtogo.org/~kevin/SeaBIOS/ and source via "git clone
git://git.linuxtogo.org/home/kevin/seabios.git".)

In addition to supporting bochs and qemu, the code also works on real
hardware via coreboot (see http://coreboot.org/ ).  This conversation
is interesting, because on real hardware seabios can't get memory size
and other parameters from cmos or from "magic" io ports.  Instead, it
has to locate and use tables that coreboot sets up.

This, by no means, should limit how qemu implements a feature, but
it's interesting to see that there is overlap with other projects.

-Kevin