Re: vgabios and other guest related firmware

Zhang, Xiantao
2008-01-02T09:54:56Z

Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon wrote:
> 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)

I am talking about the open source guest firmware. Since it is hard to
setup build environment for users, so I want to adds an binary in
kvm-source package(release version) in future. Of course, it is great
to include the whole firmware source in the tree, but seems it is big if
we includes EDK tools.

> 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