Re: [Qemu-devel] Slow kernel/initrd loading via fw_cfg; Was Re: Hack integrating SeaBios / LinuxBoot option rom with QEMU trace backends

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 10:00:02AM +0000, Blue Swirl wrote:
> I don't understand why PC can't use the same way of loading initrd by
> QEMU to guest memory before boot as Sparc32 uses. It should even be
> possible to deduplicate the kernel and initrd images: improve the
> loader to use mmap() for loading so that several guests would use the
> same pages. Preloaded kernel and initrd are paravirtual anyway, there
> could be even guest visible changes if ever needed (e.g. map
> kernel/initrd pages outside of normal RAM areas).

+1!

Even better if we extended Linux so it worked more like OS-9 (circa
1990): At boot, scan memory for modules and insmod them.  That way we
wouldn't even need an initrd since we could just supply the correct
list of modules that the guest needs to mount its root disk.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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