[libvirt] [Qemu-devel] Configuring pflash devices for OVMF firmware

[Alexandro Sanchez Bach]

>> This is all greek to me.  I take it there's something wrong with these 
>> accelerators that makes (read-only?) flash memory not work, even 
>> though the read-only mapping we now create for traditional BIOS works.  
>> Weird, but I'm of course willing to take your word for it.

> Yes, as I wrote in the other message even read-only flash memory supports commands, and these accelerators do not support direct reads + MMIO writes on the same memory slot.
> At least I checked HAX code and it doesn't; I don't know about WHPX.

(CC'd Yu Ning @ Intel's HAXM team)

Not sure, if I'm understanding the issue correctly, but isn't `HAX_VM_IOCTL_SET_RAM2` with the `HAX_RAM_INFO_ROM` flag precisely what you are looking for?

More precisely, HAX_VM_IOCTL_SET_RAM2 maps an HVA range to a GPA range, the HAX_RAM_INFO_ROM flag should allow only guest memory reads to that range [1]. When the guest attempts to write, this should trigger a VM exit that will be handled by QEMU. Also, this seems to be handled here:
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/15bede554162dda822cd762c689edb6fa32b6e3b/target/i386/hax-mem.c#L205-L207

Best,
Alexandro

[1] https://github.com/intel/haxm/blob/master/docs/api.md