[Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/4][RFC] Bring ROM source into tree via git submodules

[Anthony Liguori]

This series is still a work in progress but I wanted to get some feedback on
the general idea.

Today we ship ROMs that are required for guests to execute properly.  These ROMs
are target specific and consist of target code that runs in the guest's context.

Because these ROMs require target-specific toolchains, we include binary copies.
In some cases, cross compilers aren't available.

The ROMs we ship are not easily reproducible today.  Some are better documented
than others.  Distributions typically have a hard requirement that they must
build all of their binaries from source.  Since we don't distribute the source
for these projects, this has led to all sorts of packaging related problems.

I would like to make the ROMs we ship buildable via the QEMU make system.  I
still want to include binary ROMs but I want the building of the ROMs we ship to
be a one step process.

This series adds git submodules for the BIOS and VGABIOS we use for QEMU.  I've
setup trees on repo.or.cz that contain the changes we make to each of these
projects.  The trees are derived from scripts originally written by Avi that
among other things, extract out the bios/ directory from the Bochs project.

If you do a normal git clone of the QEMU tree, you don't automatically checkout
the submodules.  To do that, you have to run an explicit git submodule update
command.  This should make the workflow for most people identical to what it
is today.

I'd like to make the Makefile logic smarter such that it always installed roms
that it builds whenever the right tool chain is available.  Distributions would
just make use of --disable-blobs and would not need additional packages for
etherboot, bochs bios, etc.