[Xen-devel] Is there any limitation on the firmware size in Xen?

["Charles Arnold" <carnold@xxxxxxxx>]

I was asked the following question which I am posting to the list.

"
My name is Gary Lin, and I am the maintainer of the OVMF package, a UEFI
implementation for the virtual machines.

Recently, I was testing an upstream patchset[*] and encountered some
problems in Xen. Maybe you can help me or give me some hints.

To be short, the edk2/ovmf upstream is going to increase the firmware
size from 2MB to 4MB to fulfill windows HCK, and we have to test
different types of VM to make sure the patchset really work. When I was
using the 2MB build, my Xen HVM worked as expected and showed the boot
menu. However, if I use the 4MB build, I got something like this from
"xl dmesg":

(d32)  - CPU0 ... 39-bit phys ... fixed MTRRs ... var MTRRs [1/8] ... done.
(d32) Testing HVM environment:
(d32)  - REP INSB across page boundaries ... passed
(d32)  - GS base MSRs and SWAPGS ... passed
(d32) Passed 2 of 2 tests
(d32) Writing SMBIOS tables ...
(d32) Loading OVMF ...
(d32) no BIOS ROM image found
(d32) *** HVMLoader bug at hvmloader.c:389
(d32) *** HVMLoader crashed.

I tried to trace the code and found that in libxl__load_hvm_firmware_module()
in tools/libxl/libxl_dom.c actully loaded the file and add_module_to_list()
in tools/libxc/xc_dom_x86.c was loading a firmware "module" with 4194304
bytes. However, when hvmloader loaded "bios_module" with get_module_entry(),
modlist is NULL. It seems the firmware data was removed for some reason.

Here are my questions:

1. Is there any limitation on the firmware size in Xen?

2. How is hvm_start_info passed to hvmloader?

Thanks,

Gary Lin

[*] https://github.com/lersek/edk2.git branch emu4k
"

- Charles



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