Comment 5 for bug 1737211

Revision history for this message
Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer) wrote :

Hi Nathan,
I highly appreciate you coming up with the change proposed here as I can include it when working on this set of packages anyway.
IMHO it is an actual feature request, even thou the reasons to have missed to add the feature earlier lie in the past - I want you to understand why, so I added a bit of background below.

In general you have to understand the reason for "prebuilt PXE roms bundled with qemu were removed in favour of building them all from source" - the reason for that is [1].
TL;DR - blobs are of unknown source, can be impossible to fix and critical if a lawyer comes by, so they have to be built from source wherever possible.

Then on top of that there was an issue with ipxe-qemu that I started to tackle about 2 months ago [2] and will be fixed in the 18.04 cycle - this one caused the Ubuntu ipxe roms to stay behind upstream for too long. The TL;DR of it is that new builds break migration as well as suspend/resume across versions. I have a POC that works to fix it while being able to update to the latest roms.

None of the above changes anything, but you should know that these roms were not just forgotten, but instead all of the misses you found had real reasons.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses
[2]: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=881263