Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [SeaBIOS] [PATCH 0/8] option rom loading overhaul.

[Kevin O'Connor]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:48:20AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> I think we have two ways to view firmware.  The first would be to treat  
> guest firmware as part of the guest.  What that means it that we should  
> store all firmware in an nvram file, migrate the nvram file during  
> migration
[...]
> The other option would be to treat guest firmware as part of the machine  
> state.

How about mixing the two?  Store the firmware in an nvram file and
migrate it during migration, but clear the nvram and reload the
firmware on each start-up and qemu reset.

[...]
>The second mechanism is  
> appealing from an ease of use perspective but the semantics of doing a  
> live migration and getting a different firmware after reset/shutdown is  
> rather scary from a support perspective.

I'm not sure I see the problem with upgrading firmware on a reboot.  I
think it would be a pretty severe bug if a new firmware broke the OS
or if an OS was heavily dependent on a specific firmware across
reboots.  After all, normal users update their bios and reboot into
pre-existing OSs all the time.

-Kevin