Issued:
2012-06-20
Updated:
2012-06-20

RHBA-2012:0802 - seabios bug fix and enhancement update

Synopsis

seabios bug fix and enhancement update

Type/Severity

Bug Fix Advisory (none)

Topic

Updated seabios packages that fix several bugs and add multiple enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The seabios package contains a legacy BIOS implementation, which can be used as a coreboot payload.

This update fixes the following bugs:

  • Previously, SeaBIOS sometimes booted from an incorrect drive. This happened because the QEMU hard-drive priority was lower than the virtio block-device priority. With this update, the QEMU hard-drive priority has been raised above the virtio block-device priority and SeaBIOS now boots from the correct drive. (BZ#757999)

  • Previously, a guest could remain unresponsive during boot after the S3 (Suspend to RAM) state as SeaBIOS failed to advertise to the guest's operating system that the device was powered down. With this update, the underlying code handling the block device resume has been fixed and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#771946)

  • Previously, a Windows guest could detect an HPET (High Precision Event Timer) device although the guest had the HPET device disabled. This occurred because the HPET device was defined in the DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table). This update removes the definition from the table and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#786142)

  • Booting from some USB flash drives could fail because SeaBIOS did not support recovery from USB STALL conditions. This update adds support for recovery from STALLs. (BZ#801293)

  • RTC (Real-Time Clock) wake-up for Windows guest did not work. With this update, the underlying code of FADT (Fixed ACPI Description Table) has been fixed to match QEMU behavior and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#804933)

  • Previously, if a device was hot plugged while the guest was still processing a previous hot-plug event, the new hot-plug event failed to be processed and the device was not detected. With this update, SeaBIOS uses a different event to handle hotplugging and the problem no longer occurs. (BZ#808033)

  • Guest booting could fail if the guest had more than 62 sockets and multiple virtio disk devices. This happened because, BIOS ran out of memory and failed to initialize the boot disk. With this update, new memory is allocated under these circumstances and booting succeeds. (BZ#810471)

This update also adds these enhancements:

  • The in-guest S4 (Suspend-to-Disk) and S3 (Suspend-to-RAM) power management features were added as a Technology Preview. The features provide the ability to perform suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-RAM functions on the guest. To enable the feature, users have to choose the /usr/share/seabios/bios-pm.bin file for VM BIOS instead of the default /usr/share/seabios/bios.bin file through libvirt. (BZ#809797)

  • SeaBIOS now supports booting from virtio-scsi devices. (BZ#782028)

More information about Red Hat Technology Previews is available here: https://access.redhat.com/support/offerings/techpreview/

All seabios users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix these bugs and add these enhancements.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via the Red Hat Network. Details on how to use the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/11258

Affected Products

ProductVersionArch
Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support Extension6x86_64
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop6x86_64

Updated Packages

  • seabios-0.6.1.2-19.el6.x86_64.rpm
  • seabios-0.6.1.2-19.el6.src.rpm

Fixes

CVEs

(none)

References

Additional information