Re: [Qemu-devel] Anyone seeing huge slowdown launching qemu with Linux 2.6.35?

[Anthony Liguori]

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.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>   That way we'd stay 100% compatible to everything we have and also get a fast 
> path for reading big chunks of data from fw_cfg. All we'd need is a command to 
> set the 'file' we're in.
>
> Even better yet, why not use virtio-9p and expose all of fw_cfg as files? Then 
> implement a simple virtio-9p client in SeaBIOS and maybe even get direct 
> kernel/initrd boot from a real 9p system ;).
>
>
> Alex
>
>