Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] pc-bios: Use iPXE ROMs

[Alex Williamson]

On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 23:24 +0100, Stefan Weil wrote:
> Am 15.03.2011 18:00, schrieb Alex Williamson:
> > Refresh PXE ROMs from the iPXE project (http://ipxe.org). This
> > includes moving eepro100 to use standard naming and including a
> > script to easily refresh PXE ROMs from either a local git tree
> > or the upstream project. We include the 'git describe' output
> > in the resulting product name, making it easy to identify and
> > reproduce.

Sorry for not cc'ing, I picked the wrong Stefan.

> The name used for eepro100 was the result of this discussion thread:
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-01/msg00729.html

Thanks for the pointer, here's the relevant text:

        But a modified name without the gpxe version like
        gpxe-80861209.rom would have some advantages:
        
        * gpxe* is better than pxe* because the files contain
           a gPXE boot ROM - not a proprietary PXE ROM.

A generic pxe- prefix to me doesn't imply a proprietary ROM, simply the
purpose of the ROM.  Naming it gpxe- just means here we'd need to rename
everything to ipxe- and eventually lpxe-, npxe-, etc...

        * The romfiles are ROM files, not undefined binaries,
           so *.rom looks better than *.bin.

I agree with this one, I'm happy to rename them as .rom files.

        * For drivers like eepro100.c which implement several devices,
           a naming rule based on PCI device and vendor id (80861209)
           is better than a rule based on device names:
           devices with same ids can share the same romfile.

eepro100 now only has one ROM for all devices, so I think this is not
currently an issue.  As Kevin pointed out in the original thread,
pxe-eepro100 is more meaningful to a user than pxe-80861209.

        * Transforming an etherboot romfile name to a qemu romfile name
           is simple when all you have to do is to remove the version.
           This would also simplify pc-bios/README.

The README already leaves something to be desired for reproducibility,
I'm hoping the subtree and build script clear that up.

> So you could as well change all other rom names.
> 
> iPXE default names like 80861209.rom are nice, too.

Yes, but confusing when we end up using that same rom for every eepro100
variant.  Thanks,

Alex