Re: [Qemu-devel] AVMF & OVMF blobs in QEMU tree???

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 08/21/17 16:03, Alex Bennée wrote:
> 
> Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com> writes:
> 
>> On Mon, 2017-08-07 at 18:51 +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
>>> On 08/07/17 16:40, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>>> On 7 August 2017 at 15:31, Igor Mammedov <imammedo@redhat.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> As I recall there were issues with FAT driver licensing in edk2,
>>>>> but I've heard there were some changes in that regard.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any other reasons why we are not putting subj.
>>>>> in QEMU tree like we do with SeaBIOS and other roms?
>>>>
>>>> I suspect the primary answer is "nobody who's willing to
>>>> maintain, test and update the resulting binary blobs has
>>>> stepped forward to say they want to do so" :-)
>>>>
>>>> (I think that shipping them in the QEMU tree would be
>>>> nice but is principally a convenience for our direct
>>>> users, since distros are going to want to build their
>>>> own ROM blobs from source anyway.)
>>>
>>> I agree that OVMF and ArmVirtQemu firmware binaries (and matching
>>> varstore templates, likely compressed) should be bundled with QEMU.
>>> There are no license-related reasons left that would prevent this.
>>>
>>> Please let us discuss this when Gerd returns from vacation. (CC'ing
>>> Gerd.)
>>
>> slighly oldish wip branch:
>> https://www.kraxel.org/cgit/qemu/log/?h=work/edk2
>>
>> Related question (as the edk2 blobs are pretty big):  Do we want commit
>> this to the qemu repo directly?   Or should we create a qemu-firmware
>> repo for the precompiled blobs and hook it up as submodule?
> 
> How big?

The ArmVirtQemu firmware binary, and its matching varstore template,
need to be padded to 64MB each, after the edk2 build process completes,
before the fw binary, and a variable store created from the varstore
template, can be passed to QEMU.

So, "pretty big".

Thanks
Laszlo

> Things like github tend to get picky with blobs over 50Mb and
> git isn't really set-up for large binary bits hence things like git-lfs.
> Unfortunately there seems to be multiple solutions to the blobs in git
> problem.
> 
> We should also take some care to reproducibility so they can be updated
> by someone other than the original author.
> 
>>
>> cheers,
>>   Gerd
> 
> 
> --
> Alex Bennée
>