[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#737905: Xen: hvmloader causes immediate VCPU triple fault with SeaBIOS 1.7.4

[Michael Tokarev]

I've uploaded seabios 1.7.4-2 to debian archive which now
ships 2 versions of the bios binary -- small 128Kb one and
bios-256k.bin (with size = 256Kb, obviously).

For now, both are built with Xen support.

So for now, it is enough to just rebuild xen with seabios
>= 1.7.4-2~ to get this fixed without patching.

However, please apply the mentioned patch (or update to
xen-4.3.1 version) _and_ switch to using bios-256k.bin
instead of bios.bin, for the next release (and ofcourse
build-depend on seabios >= 1.7.4-2~ because that's the
version which introduces the new 256k binary).

This is because it is very difficult for us in seabios
to keep stripped-down/small version to fit within 128Kb
without turning off more features, and xen is a good
feature to turn off.

Besides, as usual, is there may be a way to stop embedding
those binaries into the package, and switch to using them
at runtime?  It isn't always nice when one debian package
embeds stuff from another, it is like using non-shared
libs when shared libs are provided for you.  But I've no
idea how this all works in xen.

Thanks,

/mjt