Announcing qboot, a minimal x86 firmware for QEMU

The announcement of Clear Containers (which guest author Arjan van de Ven described in an LWN article from this week) seems to have sparked some interesting work on QEMU that resulted in qboot: "a minimal x86 firmware that runs on QEMU and, together with a slimmed-down QEMU configuration, boots a virtual machine in 40 milliseconds on an Ivy Bridge Core i7 processor." Paolo Bonzini announced the project (code is available at git://github.com/bonzini/qboot.git), which is quite new: "The first commit to qboot is more or less 24 hours old, so there is definitely more work to do, in particular to extract ACPI tables from QEMU and present them to the guest. This is probably another day of work or so, and it will enable multiprocessor guests with little or no impact on the boot times. SMBIOS information is also available from QEMU."

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