Re: [Qemu-devel] [ipxe-devel] [PATCH ipxe] build: Enable IPv6 for qemu

[Tore Anderson <tore@fud.no>]

* Michael Brown

> ROM image size concerns.
> 
> I've been thinking for some time now that it would be useful to have
> a "minimal" configuration used for building real BIOS option ROM
> images and a "normal" configuration for everything else
> (undionly.kpxe, ipxe.efi, UEFI ROMs, qemu ROMs, etc).  There are
> several features that are sufficiently commonly used that it would be
> worth having them generally available in the default binaries, but
> which are currently disabled by default due to BIOS ROM size concerns.
> 
> We already have the named config mechanism.  I wonder if building a
> BIOS option ROM for a real NIC is sufficiently specialised that it
> would make sense to have a CONFIG=rom or CONFIG=minimal named
> configuration.
> 
> Thoughts from anyone?

This makes a lot of sense to me. It is a shame that the default builds
of images meant for chain-loading are lacking many of the bells and
whistles. It seems sensible to me to let space-constrained builds
explicitly disable features in order to sufficiently shrink the image,
rather than allowing them to force a "lowest common denominator"
default set on features on all builds.

The lack of default IPv6 support in ipxe.efi is complicating the IPv6
migration for us. Not that it is particularly difficult to build and
distribute our own iPXE images, but it had been much more convenient if
we could use the distribution packages. It's just one more hoop that'd
we'd rather we didn't have to jump through.

It would be nice to have IPv6 support in the default undionly.kpxe too,
but it is less of an issue there as non-UEFI hardware generally
requires IPv4 to be present in the first place.

Tore