[Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Glauber Costa <glommer@redhat.com>]

Hi people,

For a while now, we are using gpxe instead of etherboot in fedora's qemu, with strong success.
etherboot is currently deprecated, and gpxe offers a lot of interesting features, like iscsi
initiator support, besides being actively maintained. I even think with some effort we may be
able to get rid of extboot by using gpxe infrastructure to initiate virtio disks.

I propose we do the same in upstream qemu. To properly use it, there are a number of qemu, bochs bios
and kernel (in kvm case) fixes needed. But they are fairly old at this point in time, and had more than
enough time to spread around.

I've put the roms we are using in http://glommer.net/gpxe if people want to test it. They are built
from gpxe 0.9.7 without any patches, so it should be very very straightforward to reproduce. One can
also grab .rom files from rom-o-matic.net