Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH 3/4] Update makefile to build roms

[Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>]

> >> gplbios and vgabios are simple to build so it's where I started.
> >
> > This worries me. You've probably picked the easiest examples, and already
> > it doesn't fit nicely.
> >
> > Why are you trying so hard to integrate these into qemu? IMHO they really
> > don't belong there. AFAICS the roms share no significant code with qemu,
> > and require a completely different environment to build. Especially in
> > cross environments I'd expect combining the two to cause much more pain
> > than it's worth. When developing/building roms a native environment is
> > the exception rather than the norm. Even then it's not really a native
> > build, it's more a collection of hacks that allow you get away with using
> > a native toolchain.
>
> For any packager, it's absolutely necessary to build all of the
> distributed binaries from source.

I don't disagree with this.

> In general, QEMU does not support anything but lock-step versioning with
> it's ROMs.  There is no ABI between QEMU and the BIOS.

This is obviously false for things like PXE roms.

> Having multiple packages therefore makes little sense because they can
> never be independent of each other.

Depends how your build system is setup.  IMHO building a ROM and building qemu 
itself are different tasks that effectively need separate packages anyway.

I also think that the Makefile is a bad place to encode knowledge of how to 
build a rom. If roms are hard to build and configure, shouldn't we be fixing 
that uptream? If not, isn't it going to be simpler and more effective to have 
a script that fetches+builds all the roms we ship?

> As long as we include binaries in our source tree, I think we ought to
> also include the source for those binaries.

You aren't importing the source though. You're just add makefile hacks to 
build it after it's been fetched from third party repositories.

Paul