[Qemu-devel] Why is SeaBIOS used with -kernel?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I've been analyzing the libguestfs appliance[1] boot time.  See
attached file, especially the end of it.

About 50% of the boot time is because of SeaBIOS.

I'm using the qemu -kernel option.  I understand that the kernel needs
some BIOS features, eg. video stuff, E820.  But kvmtool comes with a
really minimal BIOS that implements a tiny number of calls[2] and is
far faster than SeaBIOS.

Is there something I'm missing, or for Linux + -kernel could we use a
much simpler BIOS?

Rich.

[1] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-internals.1.html
[2] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/will/kvmtool.git/tree/x86

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v

analysis.txt
Description: Text document