Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] sun4m: Add FCode ROM for TCX framebuffer

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>]

On 21/08/13 16:34, Peter Maydell wrote:

>> Unfortunately the OpenBIOS repository is still based in SVN :(  There is a
>> git-svn mirror on git.qemu.org, but currently it needs to be manually
>> updated and so is generally not particularly helpful. For the 1.6 release I
>> got Anthony to manually update the repository on git.qemu.org so that the
>> git submodule reference was updated as part of the pull request.
>>
>> The main reason for not updating the git submodule in this particular commit
>> is because this is actually a precursor to another larger sun4m framebuffer
>> patch, and once both these patches are hopefully accepted then my plan is to
>> send a single pull request to update all 3 of the OpenBIOS images at the
>> same time rather than to split architectures across different OpenBIOS
>> versions.
>
> In that case we should defer adding this fcode rom blob until then.
> I really don't like the idea of having random binary blobs in our git
> repo (and thus in our release tarballs) which aren't tied exactly to
> the sources you need to rebuild them.
>
> (It's the pain of managing this which is why I don't like binary blobs
> at all, in fact. But they're a fact of life given that mostly we don't have
> easy cross-compilation setups  :-( )

Okay so in that case what is the best way to manage to process? If both 
this and the follow-up patchset are committed first without the 
associated FCode ROM images then qemu-system-sparc will be broken until 
the main OpenBIOS images are updated because (quite rightly) the TCX 
driver will attempt to load the ROM at startup and fail because they 
aren't present...?

Is the best way to send a pull request for the update OpenBIOS images 
plus associated FCode ROMs first and then work on getting the QEMU 
patches applied? This isn't strictly correct, but the display code 
currently has a "panic" fallback in place where it should try and load 
an inbuilt TCX driver if it doesn't find a valid display ROM during probe.


ATB,

Mark.