Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC] Changing default Windows BIOS path from /c/Program Files/Qemu to c:\\Program Files\\Qemu

[Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@siriusit.co.uk>]

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
>> Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>> I'm not really sure where /c/Program Files/Qemu comes from.  Cygwin 
>>> would use /cygdrive/c/Program Files/Qemu and mingw32 would use 
>>> c:\\Program Files\\Qemu.
>>
>> I've not tried building the Windows BIOS myself, however /c/Program 
>> Files/Qemu is a MingW/MSYS path (where the default MSYS bash shell 
>> provides UNIX-like paths in this format).
> 
> Are you absolutely positive?  Have you confirmed this?  If so, on what 
> version of mingw32/msys?
> 
> As I said, I've tried this on mingw and it doesn't work.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Anthony Liguori


Hi Anthony,

Firstly, apologies for the long delay on this one - I've been away for a 
considerable part of this month and I'm afraid this fell off the radar.

MSYS is really just a port of the GNU toolchain to the Windows platform 
so that autoconf and friends can be run. So MSYS allows paths of the 
form /c/Program Files/Qemu to be used with various build tools that 
don't like \s or :s within filenames.

However, the compiled executables run using the standard MS MSVCRT.DLL 
runtime DLL which of course only allows standard Windows paths of the 
form "C:\Program Files\Qemu". So in short, if the above path is needed 
as part of the build process then it will be fine since MSYS will map 
the paths for you; however if it is needed at runtime (i.e. the full 
path is embedded as a string within an executable) then you need to use 
the standard Windows since the MS runtime won't understand it.

I did have a look at SVN trunk and it appears that bios_dir is set to be 
equal to CONFIG_QEMU_SHAREDIR; so yes for this to work at runtime it 
needs to be specified in standard Windows path format. However, you'd 
need to check that doing this wouldn't break the build for MingW elsewhere.


HTH,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland
Sirius Corporation - The Open Source Experts
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
T: +44 870 608 0063