bootdevice: FW_CFG interface for LCHS values
commitaea60a13b9d43bb4c5748a1216af954a0e9d22d4
authorSam Eiderman <shmuel.eiderman@oracle.com>
Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:41:44 +0000 (16 19:41 +0300)
committerJohn Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:47:38 +0000 (31 11:47 -0400)
tree8b8a8e2439331639633636a48136604f9dc65720
parent42f068019926078e8cd61c7c4357143199003f0b
bootdevice: FW_CFG interface for LCHS values

Using fw_cfg, supply logical CHS values directly from QEMU to the BIOS.

Non-standard logical geometries break under QEMU.

A virtual disk which contains an operating system which depends on
logical geometries (consistent values being reported from BIOS INT13
AH=08) will most likely break under QEMU/SeaBIOS if it has non-standard
logical geometries - for example 56 SPT (sectors per track).
No matter what QEMU will report - SeaBIOS, for large enough disks - will
use LBA translation, which will report 63 SPT instead.

In addition we cannot force SeaBIOS to rely on physical geometries at
all. A virtio-blk-pci virtual disk with 255 phyiscal heads cannot
report more than 16 physical heads when moved to an IDE controller,
since the ATA spec allows a maximum of 16 heads - this is an artifact of
virtualization.

By supplying the logical geometries directly we are able to support such
"exotic" disks.

We serialize this information in a similar way to the "bootorder"
interface.
The new fw_cfg entry is "bios-geometry".

Reviewed-by: Karl Heubaum <karl.heubaum@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Arbel Moshe <arbel.moshe@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Sam Eiderman <shmuel.eiderman@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Sam Eiderman <sameid@google.com>
Tested-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>
bootdevice.c
hw/nvram/fw_cfg.c
include/sysemu/sysemu.h