[SeaBIOS] S3 resume is broken on QEMU

Peter Stuge peter at stuge.se
Thu Jan 19 08:59:50 CET 2012


Gleb Natapov wrote:
> > If someone can point out a spec to the contrary I'd be happy to change
> > the default in SeaBIOS.
> 
> There is spec and there is real life. Real life should take precedence.

In real life, SeaBIOS does not need to run the VGA BIOS when I resume
my ThinkPad with coreboot.

Why should QEMU impose an artificial requirement which additionally
aligns poorly with the common specifications?

"This is how it always was" is fine to have some temporary legacy
support, but it's not an excuse to not fix the problem properly,
in the right place.


> There is not way OSMP can restore unknown state of a random vga card
> without special driver for that card.

It sounds like QEMU just needs a simple KMS driver. Isn't there
actually one already, which might fit well?


> This is why vgabios exists in the first place.

VGA BIOS exists because 30 years ago it seemed like a good idea
to abstract graphics hardware, so that the only operating system
at the time did not have to know hardware details.

That model completely and utterly fails with every operating system
today, where indeed there are, must be and should be, device drivers.


> I am also not asking to change SeaBIOS default. Just get us back
> compile time option to always enable it.

It seems older QEMU would work fine also without the option given the
right OS drivers. In case they aren't actually available I guess a
SeaBIOS compile time option is the only workaround.


//Peter



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