Re: vgabios and other guest related firmware

Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon
2008-01-02T09:30:39Z

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 04:14:53PM +0800, Zhang, Xiantao wrote:
> Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon wrote:
> >
> > I'll let the specifics to all the portability interested parties (I
> > mostly use PC) but would suspect something similar to the work done
> > for the code should be most likely what is needed :
> >
> > firmware -- x86 -- bios
> > | |- vgabios
> > |- ia64
>
> Good idea!

this was meant to be for the source files of the firmware that is needed
for each guest architecture, just like is being done now for x86 (both i386
and x86_64) with bios and vgabios.

for ia64 it will most likely include the opensource EFI firmware imported
and plus any needed patches to make it work perfectly with kvm.

> We also need to upload the ia64 firmware for kvm, and make it
> available for users use. At least, we need to provide the binary.

beware that actually providing the binary without sources might be a problem
for some distributions (like debian and derivatives like ubuntu).

most likely getting the sources and a makefile which could be used to build
the binary and copy it to the qemu/pc-bios/ directory, at release time or when
the sources had been changed and it needs to be rebuilt, and for convenience
so it can be distributed with the release tar.gz will be preferred.

for hints on how to get that look at the Makefiles in the bios or vgabios top
level directories and the top level Makefile

> BTW, current ia64 binary has 2M size, is it OK to upload it to
> kvm-source tree ?

if you are talking about the binary only, EFI BIOS from Intel, then it could
be problematic (because of the free software guidelines of some distributions)
and of course will need to have also some sort of README file clearly
specifying that the license allows for re-distribution and can be used at least
together with kvm (like the ELPIN vga bios was licensed for BOCHS)

IMHO is probably better to use only the GPL version with sources and
distribute that with kvm source packages and let the users or distributions
to manage the distribution/installation of BLOBs otherwise as that keeps the
lawyers from distracting us from the interesting technical issues.

Carlo