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authorYang Zhang <yang.z.zhang@intel.com>2015-08-28 09:58:54 +0800
committerYang Zhang <yang.z.zhang@intel.com>2015-09-01 12:44:00 +0800
commite44e3482bdb4d0ebde2d8b41830ac2cdb07948fb (patch)
tree66b09f592c55df2878107a468a91d21506104d3f /qemu/docs/bootindex.txt
parent9ca8dbcc65cfc63d6f5ef3312a33184e1d726e00 (diff)
Add qemu 2.4.0
Change-Id: Ic99cbad4b61f8b127b7dc74d04576c0bcbaaf4f5 Signed-off-by: Yang Zhang <yang.z.zhang@intel.com>
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+= Bootindex property =
+
+Block and net devices have bootindex property. This property is used to
+determine the order in which firmware will consider devices for booting
+the guest OS. If the bootindex property is not set for a device, it gets
+lowest boot priority. There is no particular order in which devices with
+unset bootindex property will be considered for booting, but they will
+still be bootable.
+
+== Example ==
+
+Let's assume we have a QEMU machine with two NICs (virtio, e1000) and two
+disks (IDE, virtio):
+
+qemu -drive file=disk1.img,if=none,id=disk1
+ -device ide-drive,drive=disk1,bootindex=4
+ -drive file=disk2.img,if=none,id=disk2
+ -device virtio-blk-pci,drive=disk2,bootindex=3
+ -netdev type=user,id=net0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0,bootindex=2
+ -netdev type=user,id=net1 -device e1000,netdev=net1,bootindex=1
+
+Given the command above, firmware should try to boot from the e1000 NIC
+first. If this fails, it should try the virtio NIC next; if this fails
+too, it should try the virtio disk, and then the IDE disk.
+
+== Limitations ==
+
+1. Some firmware has limitations on which devices can be considered for
+booting. For instance, the PC BIOS boot specification allows only one
+disk to be bootable. If boot from disk fails for some reason, the BIOS
+won't retry booting from other disk. It can still try to boot from
+floppy or net, though.
+
+2. Sometimes, firmware cannot map the device path QEMU wants firmware to
+boot from to a boot method. It doesn't happen for devices the firmware
+can natively boot from, but if firmware relies on an option ROM for
+booting, and the same option ROM is used for booting from more then one
+device, the firmware may not be able to ask the option ROM to boot from
+a particular device reliably. For instance with the PC BIOS, if a SCSI HBA
+has three bootable devices target1, target3, target5 connected to it,
+the option ROM will have a boot method for each of them, but it is not
+possible to map from boot method back to a specific target. This is a
+shortcoming of the PC BIOS boot specification.