Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Doug Goldstein <cardoe@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] Separately buildable binary blobs
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2013 01:35:00
Message-Id: CAFWqQMRiLCwoZbE8Zt=AFPNEpHEaagCCRaoQnFov7K61MP5HJg@mail.gmail.com
1 How important are separately buildable binary blobs? Rather than speak
2 in terms of app/foo and app/bar, I'll just come out and say its
3 app-emulation/qemu. Due to the nature of the package it relies on
4 firmware blobs to emulate certain aspects of the system (e.g. BIOS).
5 I've been working on making each of the binary blobs buildable and
6 adding them to the tree e.g.
7 sys-firmware/ipxe, sys-firmware/seabios, sys-firmware/sgabios,
8 sys-firmware/vgabios. Unfortunately QEMU upstream keeps their own
9 repos of the various components and for each release builds their own
10 and commits it within their repo. They ship with these pre-built blobs
11 and that is what they install by default. The result is from the true
12 package upstreams there often is not a release that works with QEMU.
13 For example, QEMU 1.3.0 requires a git revision of SeaBIOS.
14
15 So basically, how important is it to keep supporting these separately
16 buildable blobs knowing that it might slow the release of QEMU within
17 our own tree.
18
19 --
20 Doug Goldstein

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] Separately buildable binary blobs Peter Stuge <peter@×××××.se>