BIOS shipped as binary blobs without source
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
qemu-kvm (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
High
|
Dustin Kirkland | ||
Lucid |
Fix Released
|
High
|
Dustin Kirkland |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: qemu-kvm
<cjwatson> kirkland: ok, I'm lost now. What BIOS source are we actually using in kvm, where's its source, and why are there binary blobs in the qemu-kvm package?
<kirkland> cjwatson: well, we have seabios in the archive now, but upstream qemu strongly recommended that we use the bios they've blessed and released in 0.12.3
<cjwatson> kirkland: we need to ship source for it
<cjwatson> it's not OK to have sourceless binary blobs in main
<kirkland> cjwatson: we runtime-depended on seabios for a while, but it caused a few bugs that we couldn't reproduce against upstream
<kirkland> cjwatson: agreed, this is an oversight
<cjwatson> IMO we should be building it too, and making sure we get the same output from doing so
<kirkland> cjwatson: open a bug; i'm onsite at dell today/tomorrow, onsite at eucalyptus all of next week; i'll try to find some time
<cjwatson> ok
<kirkland> cjwatson: http://
<cjwatson> yep, saw that
<cjwatson> I understand the reasons, but we're wildly infringing our own policy here
<cjwatson> not to mention infringing copyright on the BIOSes, if this is LGPLed (it is, isn't it?)
<kirkland> cjwatson: i'm happy to revert that commit, and reopen https:/
<ubottu> Ubuntu bug 513273 in qemu-kvm "kvm with -vga std is broken since karmic" [Low,Fix released]
<cjwatson> I'm not asking for us to use vgabios specifically
<kirkland> cjwatson: -vga std is low on my wishlist, fwiw
<cjwatson> the separate source package or whatever
<cjwatson> I'm entirely OK with it being shipped by qemu-kvm if that's considered appropriate, but not as binary blobs - we need to ship the matching source
Related branches
Changed in qemu-kvm (Ubuntu Lucid): | |
importance: | Undecided → High |
milestone: | none → ubuntu-10.04-beta-2 |
Changed in qemu-kvm (Ubuntu Lucid): | |
status: | New → In Progress |
assignee: | nobody → Dustin Kirkland (kirkland) |
cjwatson> any binary blobs, yes
(need to be pruned or source provided).
* bios.bin we can get from seabios (although there are known bugs with the version of seabios present in Lucid, but not in the upstream version of bios.bin)
* vgabios we can get from vgabios (although there are known bugs with the version of seabios present in Lucid, but not in the upstream version of vgabios)
* PXE roms we should get from kvm-pxe
* OpenBIOS comes from openbios.org, which is GPLv2, but not packaged for Ubuntu, see Bug #183495
* video.x comes from maconlinux.org, which is GPLv2, but not packaged for Ubuntu
So ideally, we need to:
a) depend on seabios
b) depend on vgabios
c) package openbios, and depend on openbios
d) package mol, and depend on mol
Packaging openbios and mol may not be reasonable for Lucid.
We have been discouraged by upstream QEMU to build/run different versions of any of these ROMs from what's shipped in the upstream tarball, as those versions are the ones that are known to work well.