Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/1] qemu-firmware repo

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 01:34:12PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 27/09/2017 11:15, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 09:19:22AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> >> Are you planning to include only submodules, or also "QEMU-native"
> >> firmware such as linuxboot, kvmvapic, s390-ccw, spapr-rtas, etc.?
> > 
> > The submodules make sense to split out because distro vendors buld them
> > independently of QEMU, and would rather not have them in the tarballs,
> > so they have a clearer path to license compliance and legal export
> > certification.
> > 
> > The other bits of mention are all built normally as part of QEMU and
> > not subject to these problems, so I don't see a benefit to splitting
> > them out of QEMU.
> 
> They aren't rebuilt in general.  You end up with x86 builds of
> qemu-system-x86 rebuilding linuxboot, ppc builds of qemu-system-ppc
> rebuilding spapr-rtas, etc. (search configure for "roms=").  In fact,
> QEMU has a special exception in Fedora just because these are too hard
> to untangle.
> 
> So the advantage would be the ability to introduce better infrastructure
> for cross compilation, without complicating further the QEMU build system.

Ah I see.

> 
> > putting those bits in the qemu-firmware
> > repo would re-introduce the problem we're trying to solve because
> > distros would then need to get linuxboox, kvmvapi etc from a tarball
> > of qemu-firmware which would once again include all the bits they
> > don't want to have.
> 
> This is true.  We could distribute a qemu-firmware tarball with just the
> QEMU-specific bits, and a qemu-firmware-all tarball with also those that
> are built separately.

Yep, as long as there's a tarball for the QEMU bits that does not
contain the 3rd party bits, that would work.

Regards,
Daniel
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