Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/10] bundle edk2 platform firmware with QEMU

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Sun, Mar 10, 2019 at 12:21:55PM +0100, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> On 3/10/19 4:56 AM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 09, 2019 at 01:48:16AM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> >> Repo:   https://github.com/lersek/qemu.git
> >> Branch: edk2_build
> >>
> >> This series advances the roms/edk2 submodule to the "edk2-stable201903"
> >> release, and builds and captures platform firmware binaries from that
> >> release. At this point they are meant to be used by both end-users and
> >> by Igor's ACPI unit tests in qtest ("make check").
> >>
> >> Previous discussion:
> >>
> >>   [Qemu-devel] bundling edk2 platform firmware images with QEMU
> >>   http://mid.mail-archive.com/address@hidden
> >>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2019-03/msg02601.html
> 
> There David raised a concern about "[adding] ~206 MB of binaries to the
> pc-bios directory". I'm also worried.
> 
> GitHub kindly suggest to use git-lfs. It is an extra dependency I'd
> rather strongly avoid (because we support a wide range of host OS, each
> using a wide types of filesystems).
> 
> What about storing those binaries on a file server (http/ftp) altogether
> with a file containing its hashed digest (SHA1/SHA256)? Then we already
> have all the required tools to fetch and verify those blob roms with the
> build system.
> Or we could store the hashes in the QEMU repository too.

A simple approach would simply be to 'xz' compress all the edk*.fd
files but still store them in git. They're already opaque binary
files, so replacing one binary format with another binary format
is no big deal IMHO

$ ls -alsh edk2-*
1.1M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.1M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-aarch64-code.fd.xz
2.1M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange  64M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-arm-code.fd
772K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange  64M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-arm-vars.fd
3.5M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 3.5M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-i386-code.fd
3.5M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 3.5M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-i386-secure-code.fd
528K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 528K Mar 11 10:29 edk2-i386-vars.fd
 12K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange  11K Mar 11 10:29 edk2-licenses.txt
3.5M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 3.5M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-x86_64-code.fd
3.5M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 3.5M Mar 11 10:29 
edk2-x86_64-secure-code.fd

This gives a 50% disk space saving over the sparse size:

$ ls -alsh edk2-*
1.1M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.1M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-aarch64-code.fd.xz
1.1M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.1M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-arm-code.fd.xz
 12K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 9.8K Mar 11 10:29 edk2-arm-vars.fd.xz
1.6M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.6M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-i386-code.fd.xz
1.8M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.8M Mar 11 10:29 
edk2-i386-secure-code.fd.xz
4.0K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange  320 Mar 11 10:29 edk2-i386-vars.fd.xz
 12K -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange  11K Mar 11 10:29 edk2-licenses.txt
1.6M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.6M Mar 11 10:29 edk2-x86_64-code.fd.xz
1.9M -rw-rw-r--. 1 berrange berrange 1.9M Mar 11 10:29 
edk2-x86_64-secure-code.fd.xz

So about 9 MB compressed, instead of 20MB for the uncompressed sparse
files, which is on a par with the existing ROM sizes.

We would then need a "make" rule that runs  unxz to "build" the firmware
files. Wouldn't need to be more complicated that this:

   edk2-%.fd: edk2-%.fd.xz
         unzx -c $< > $@

   CLEANFILES += $(wildcard edk2*.fd)

Regards,
Daniel
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