Jeremy Katz wrote: > I sent this to the bochs list earlier today, but given that kvm is > already carrying patches for the BIOS, it may be worthwhile/interesting > to add this also as it can make the user experience substantially nicer. > > -- Begin forwarded message -- > > The attached patch adds support for a relatively basic boot device > selection menu to the bochs bios code. > > Instead of immediately booting from the boot device set in the cmos, we > wait for 3 seconds for the user to press F10; if they press it, then we > show a basic boot menu that they can select what device to boot from. > Otherwise, we continue on with what was setup before running the virtual > machine. The advantage is that users can change their boot device just > on rebooting a virtual machine rather than having to stop and then > restart it. > > This includes the wait routines added by VirtualBox > (http://www.virtualbox.org) in their modifications to the rombios as > they made things a bit easier. > >
This is nice! Two comments: - it would be nice for qemu to provide the bios an indication if the '-boot' parameter was specified to qemu. if so, the bios should skip the menu on first bootup, reducing the boot delay. On subsequent boots the menu should be offered. This is primarily useful in managed environments. - coding this stuff in rombios32.c instead of rombios.c (with its strange idea of C) is *much* preferable for maintainability. As far as i can tell, there is no reason not to do so, especially for code which is not called from the 16-bit OS. -- Any sufficiently difficult bug is indistinguishable from a feature. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ kvm-devel mailing list kvm-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kvm-devel
