Hi Paolo, Sorry for the delay in responding.
On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 10:13:30AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > On 04/03/2015 22:42, Kevin O'Connor wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 05:57:02PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > >> F11 and F12 are trapped by some terminal emulators, and sgabios does > >> not always recognize function keys very well. > >> > >> Real-world machines often provide replacements for function keys for > >> use on the serial console: ESC+1...ESC+0 for F1...F10, ESC+SHIFT+1 and > >> ESC+SHIFT+2 for F11...F12. Accept all of them, which can be useful in > >> case the user has set boot-menu-key. > > > > Thanks. Did you encounter this problem with QEMU or on a real machine > > with coreboot? > > With QEMU. > > > Out of curiosity, is there a reason why one can't modify > > boot-menu-key/boot-menu-message for those machines that don't support > > F12? > > The trivial reason is that right now, QEMU doesn't support customizing > the menu key and message (also there are several management layers > between QEMU and the user, such as libvirt/oVirt/OpenStack, and you'd > have to add support in all of them). > > But more important, which keys are and are not available depends on the > client, not on the server. So for VNC all keys work but on at least a > viewer F8 is inconvenient because it brings up a menu (thankfully one > item in the menu is "Send F8"); for the serial console on a Unix machine > F12 is okay but F11 might bring the terminal full screen; on older Mac > OS X machine F9-F12 were intercepted by the OS, but on newer OS X > releases function keys are basically gone for good. A configuration > that always works might be broken by the addition of a new client. The above makes sense. The F12 key comes from Bochs bios. Given the difficulties in using F-keys (on QEMU as well as on real machines) I wonder if we should just change the SeaBIOS default to ESC? I don't like changing the default message to "Press ESC+@ or F12 for boot menu." as I think the description becomes confusing when multiple options are given. So, ESC+@ could be a hidden feature, but admittedly that's not a great option. Otherwise the technical parts of the patch looks okay to me. -Kevin _______________________________________________ SeaBIOS mailing list [email protected] http://www.seabios.org/mailman/listinfo/seabios
