Re: [PATCH 0/4] Reintroduce OVMF support

[Wei Liu <wei.liu2@citrix.com>]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 01:52:43PM +0100, David Vrabel wrote:
> On 15/10/13 17:40, Wei Liu wrote:
> > This small series reintroduces OVMF support in Xen
> 
> I think somewhere in this series there needs to a brief description of
> what OVMF is.
> 

OVMF is a project to enable UEFI firmware for virtual machines. It's
part of the EDK2 kit. OVMF was first introduced to Xen about a year ago
but it was later disabled due to build process breakage.

Now that the build problem is resolved in upstream we would like to
re-enable it in Xen.

> With the exception of the first patch this is just adding yet another
> component to clone and build.  Why is this useful?  Why isn't
> (effectively) --with-system-ovmf always enabled (and thus not actually
> needed as an option)?
> 

Idealy we should always use the binary provided by distro, but
pratically their binaries are not always up to date / don't always work
with Xen.

> Isn't Xen's keenness to build it's own particular versions of stuff
> something that causes significant problems for distributions?
> 

We've been trying to work closely with upstream to fix bugs. But the
proecess for distros to pick up upstream bug fixes are different
stories which we have no control over.

That's why we provide several --with-system-FOO options in our build
system. The packager can choose in stock binaries if they want to. But
if the in stock binaries don't work they can use our trees.

Wei.

> David