Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 12/13] Add zipl bootloader interpreter

[Carsten Otte]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> This is a bit unfortunate.  Wouldn't it be better to write a custom 
> version of zipl that ran in the guest?
>
> This is like implementing grub in qemu (or pygrub in Xen).  The level of 
> security exposure this introduces is really scary.
Oh that's really the wrong way to see it. We don't have bios, and 
therefore we need _some_ functionality to start up initial code on the 
disk. The interface that Alex is implementing is also used by the real 
hardware to load from disk in case a scsi/fcp volume is used, and it is 
part of the published machine architecture. That's very unlike grub.