Re: [RFC PATCH qemu] spapr: Kill SLOF

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Wed, 2020-01-08 at 13:34 +1100, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
> On 07/01/2020 20:39, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> > On Tue, 2020-01-07 at 12:55 +1100, Alexey Kardashevskiy wrote:
> > > Petitboot kernel+initramdisk almost replaces SLOF + GRUB.
> > 
> > Is this necessarily a good thing?
> 
> The bare metal host and the powernv machine in QEMU do not use grub,
> they use petitboot which parses all grub configs and supports quite a lot.

How well does the distro integration work? Eg. if I change something
in /etc/default/grub and then run grub2-mkconfig, can I expect my
changes to be picked up? In which scenarios will that *not* work?

> Using Linux for a boot loader is not powerpc-only thing really, some
> folks do this too (forgot who, just heard this at the KVM forum).

While other options are available and some architectures use
something else entirely, GRUB is the de-facto standard across most
of the non-obscure architectures.

I guess the question is whether it's more important to be consistent
within the architecture or across them. I think the latter might be
preferable, especially when we consider what I think is the most
common scenario, that is, someone who's used to having GRUB on their
x86 machine running a ppc64 guest on the cloud. The more skills they
can automatically transfer over, the better.

> > Personally I quite like the fact
> > that I can use the same bootloader across x86, ppc64 and aarch64.
> 
> I am not suggesting removing SLOF soon

Perhaps the patch subject shouldn't be "kill SLOF" then? ;)

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization