[libvirt] [qemu RFC] qapi: add "firmware.json"

[Thomas Huth]

On 09.04.2018 18:50, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 04/09/18 10:19, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>>>> +{ 'enum' : 'SystemFirmwareType',
>>>> +  'data' : [ 'bios', 'slof', 'uboot', 'uefi' ] }
>>>
>>> The naming here is quite a bad mixture between firmware interface
>>> ('bios', 'uefi') and firmware implementations ('slof', 'uboot'). There
>>> could be other implementations of BIOS or UEFI than SeaBIOS and EDK2 ...
>>> so I'd suggest to rather name them 'seabios' and 'edk2' here instead.
>>
>> uboot for example implements uefi unterfaces too (dunno how complete,
>> but reportly recent versions can run uefi shell and grub just fine).
> 
> Indeed: when I was struggling with this enum type and tried to look for
> more firmware types to add, my googling turned up the "UEFI on Top of
> U-Boot" whitepaper, from Alex and Andreas :)
> 
> Again, this reaches to the root of the problem: when a user creates a
> new domain, using high-level tools, they just want to tick "UEFI". (Dan
> has emphasized this to me several times, so I think I get the idea by
> now, if not the full environment.) We cannot ask the user, "please be
> more specific, do you want UEFI from edk2, or UEFI on top of U-Boot?"

But you are designing a rather low-level interface here, which should
IMHO rather be precise than fuzzy. So should this "just want to tick
UEFI" rather be handled in the high-level tools instead?

Alternatively, what about providing some kind of "alias" or "nickname"
setting here, too? So the EDK2 builds would get
SystemFirmwareType="edk2" and "SystemFirmwareAlias="uefi" for example.

 Thomas