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 witha slimmed-down QEMU configuration, boots a virtual machine in 40milliseconds 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 isdefinitely more work to do, in particular to extract ACPI tables fromQEMU and present them to the guest. This is probably another day ofwork or so, and it will enable multiprocessor guests with little or noimpact on the boot times. SMBIOS information is also available from QEMU."