Re: [Qemu-devel] wrong bios.bin file in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 causes blue screen on w2k guest

[Soren Hansen <soren@ubuntu.com>]

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On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 02:48:34PM +0100, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
> > If that's really the case, I'm curious why it's distributed in its
> > binary form rather than being built at runtime.
> build-time?

Yes, my mistake :)

> Perhaps because the (cross-)compiler used to build the BIOS is not
> present in many distros and would be a quite inconvenient dependency.
> This is for the PC bios from bochs.

That's a reasonable point. 

> Now if all bioses shipped with qemu were built you would need some 4
> cross-toolchains.

That's a good point. For us, however, the only alternative is to depend
on other packages to provide these blobs (bochsbios, vgabios,
openbios-sparc, etc).

> Note that this code doesn't run in this form on the host Debian/Ubuntu
> is on.

That does not matter much.

> It can well be treated as data, not code, like jpeg's shipped in
> binary with a program. 

The difference is that a jpeg is usually the original work and there is
no source to distribute that can be used to regenerate the jpeg.

>> I'm also not familiar with the changes in the bios.diff. Are they
>> specific to qemu or could the theoretically be applied to upstream
>> bochs without any ill side effects?
> There are only two tiny changes, one is generic, one is qemu specific.

Ok. I'll change our bochsbios build to build a specific QEMU bios with
these changes. That should make everyone happy.

I sense that any response to this e-mail would be off topic for the ml
(even this mail is borderline), so please follow-up privately.

-- 
Soren Hansen
Ubuntu Server Team
http://www.ubuntu.com/

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