Re: [Qemu-devel] [PULL for-2.4 0/7] update ipxe roms, fix efi support

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 3:28 PM, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 21/07/2015 16:25, Peter Maydell wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Well, it did say "This pull finally fixes the efi boot support.  ipxe is
>>> > updated to the latest master, two non-upstream commits needed to make
>>> > efi work are added on top, and the build process is tweaked a bit".
>> Right, but if you want us to switch from "we just mirror
>> upstream ipxe" to "we have our own ipxe" then it's probably
>> better to start with that, rather than by submitting a pullreq
>> that can't be applied until we switch our ipxe workflow.
>>
>> Do we really need this for 2.4, or can we wait and sort
>> this out afterwards? It feels a bit late in the release
>> cycle to start doing this kind of thing to me.
>
> Well, it is a bugfix.  shim.efi doesn't work with upstream iPXE, and
> hence doesn't work with the ROMs currently distributed by QEMU (Fedora
> applies the patches already).
>
> The patches have missed 2.3 and 2.4 because Gerd has been sending them
> again upstream every month.
>
> That said, I see your point.  It's probably not of utmost importance as
> long as OVMF remains non-free and hence not shipped by most distributions.

With regards to git.qemu.org mirroring:
I could update the ipxe.git mirror URL on git.qemu.org to Gerd's
public repo and change the description to indicate that this includes
out-of-tree patches.  Please let me know if you'd like to go ahead.

I'd prefer it if we don't ship a patched ipxe since Paolo mentions
Fedora already has a fix in place.  Instead of propagating that fix
into QEMU, let's focus on ipxe upstream to solve the problem.

I've reviewed the ipxe-devel archives and see that patches have been
on the list for weeks/months without replies.  I didn't see ping
emails though so maybe it just requires a bit of poking via email or
IRC.

We either need to figure out how to get attention upstream or work
with others to add upstream maintainers.  I see that Hannes Reinecke
also has patches on ipxe-devel that look ignored, so Gred and Laszlo
are not the only ones struggling to get patches upstream into ipxe.

Stefan