Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 0/4] Reintroduce OVMF support

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2013-10-16 at 13:52 +0100, David Vrabel wrote:
> On 15/10/13 17:40, Wei Liu wrote:
> > This small series reintroduces OVMF support in Xen
> 
> I think somewhere in this series there needs to a brief description of
> what OVMF is.
> 
> With the exception of the first patch this is just adding yet another
> component to clone and build.

It's enabling an already existing component. The description you are
asking for was part of the original commit a few years ago. I suppose it
can't hurt to repeat it.

>   Why is this useful?  Why isn't
> (effectively) --with-system-ovmf always enabled (and thus not actually
> needed as an option)?
> 
> Isn't Xen's keenness to build it's own particular versions of stuff
> something that causes significant problems for distributions?

The lack of a --with-system style option does cause issues I think.

On the one hand building one automatically is convenient for direct
consumers of Xen and saves them having to learn about multiple project's
builds etc when all they want to do is install Xen from source (which
despite our recommendations to use distro packaging plenty of "end
users" to).

On the other hand I agree, Xen does pull in too much stuff at build
time.

We also have a legacy of actually pulling stuff into the tree (e.g.
libaio) which really would be better left to distros as build
dependencies, I've been trying to undo some of that sort of thing (and
fight against new instances) recently.

I guess it's a balancing act and for something like OVMF I think I would
come down on the side of including it but having the option to use some
existing binary.

FWIW qemu ships seabios and ovmf binaries and/or builds it at compile
time, for similar reasons I think.

Ian.


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