Re: [Qemu-devel] Re: [PATCH] Drop roms from standard build

[Anthony Liguori]

Paul Brook wrote:
> On Thursday 09 July 2009, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>   
> > Jan Kiszka wrote:
> >     
> > > There is no point in generating and copying the optionsrom each time
> > > qemu is build. It's a maintenance task given that we carry them as
> > > binaries already. And that task could also be triggered explicitly via
> > > 'make roms'. Solves the mingw32 build breakage, too.
> > >       
> > Yeah, it needs fixing but we absolutely want to build the roms as part
> > of the normal build process.
> >     
>
> I disagree. For the most part I'd expect roms to be better maintained as a 
> side project.
>   

For things like gpxe where there's a well defined boundary between QEMU 
and the rom, yes, that makes sense.

For something like the PC BIOS, it's proven to be very difficult to 
maintain it out of tree.  It's difficult for people to develop patches 
for it, difficult for people to test those patches, and then difficult 
for the maintainers to pull in those patches.

Making it part of the tree and a standard part of the build system will 
tremendously simplify that.

> I think the chances of the user having appropriate toolchains readily 
> available (without significant additional per-rom configury) are extremely 
> slim.
>   

Actually, for x86, all of our ROMs will just use GCC so when building 
x86 on x86, it's very likely the right tool chain is available.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori