Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM call agenda for 2013-05-28

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> writes:

> On Fri, 2013-05-31 at 08:04 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> 
>> <soapbox>
>> 
>> Fork OVMF, drop the fat module, and just add GPL code.  It's an easily
>> solvable problem.
>
> Heh. Actually it doesn't need to be a fork. It's modular, and the FAT
> driver is just a single module. Which is actually included in *binary*
> form in the EDK2 repository, I believe, and its source code is
> elsewhere.
>
> We could happily make a GPL¹ or LGPL implementation of a FAT module and
> build our OVMF with that instead, and we wouldn't need to fork OVMF at
> all.

So can't we have GPL virtio modules too?  I don't think there's any
problem there except for the FAT module.

I would propose more of a virtual fork.  It could consist of a git repo with
the GPL modules + a submodule for edk2.  Ideally, there would be no need
to actually fork edk2.

My assumption is that edk2 won't take GPL code.  But does ovmf really
need to live in the edk2 tree?

If we're going to get serious about supporting OVMF, it we need
something that isn't proprietary.

> -- 
> dwmw2
>
> ¹ If it's GPL, of course, then we mustn't include any *other* binary
> blobs in our OVMF build. But the whole point in this conversation is
> that we don't *want* to do that. So that's fine.

It's even more fundamental.  OVMF as a whole (at least in it's usable
form) is not Open Source.  Without even tackling the issue of GPL code
sharing, that is a fundamental problem that needs to be solved if we're
going to serious about making changes to QEMU to support it.

I think solving the general problem will also enable GPL code sharing
though.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori