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 |