On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 12:49:07PM +0100, Michal Suchánek wrote: > On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 11:26:32AM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 12:03:46PM +0100, Michal Suchánek wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > > > this came up because these rom files are somewhat difficult to build on > > > non-x86, and distributions that have problem with distributing blobs > > > verbatim may be missing them. > > > > How is the proposal going to help distros though ? Even if QEMU stops > > using the redundant ROMs from qemu-system-aarch64, they're still going > > to be needed by qemu-system-x86_64, which will be shipped on all arch > > hosts. So surely *all* non-x86 build targets still need to be able > > to cross-compile the x86 ROMs. > > Or make arangements for cross-architecture installation of the package. > So long as you want to do x86 emulatated machine on non-x86 that also > boots from network it would be a problem to not have the iPXE roms. And > similar for Arm/RiscV/Loongarch which are also supported by iPXE but > need a different architecture-specific ROM to be bootable. Not sure how > well that actually works with qemu.
To be clear here: the iPXE roms are needed for running ppc64 on ppc64 which is a configuration in which they are definitely dead bytes. They are needed even if the VM does not boot from network. And probabaly a lot of other cases when an empty ROM would be perfectly fine but qemu refuses to start because the ROM is missing. Thanks Michal
