Re: missing boot rom: is it really a fatal error?

[Thomas Huth]

On 07/05/2023 19.56, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> Hi!
>
> In old good world ;), there was qemu which didn't require boot roms to be 
> present
> for all devices for which bootrom file is defined, missing rom was just a 
> warning.
> But this changed in 2014, 9 years ago, with this commit:
>
> commit 178e785fb4507ec3462dc772bbe08303416ece47
> From: Marcel Apfelbaum <marcel.a@redhat.com>

Marcel left Red Hat a while ago ... CC:-ing him with his current address - 
maybe he remembers why that fix was needed...

 Thomas


> Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 19:34:41 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] hw/pci: fixed error flow in pci_qdev_init
>
>    Verify return code for pci_add_option_rom.
>
> where inability to load rom file started being treated as an error.
> Up until now I didn't even know about this change, until today when someone 
> bugged
> me about non-working qemu on debian, due to missing network boot roms (this a
> packaging issue due to me being unaware of the above change).
>
> What is the reason to require boot roms to be present and throw an error if 
> not?
>
> I'm about to revert that old change on debian, to make it just a warning 
> instead
> of an error (the code is different now, but the same principle applies), - 
> because
> I dislike dependencies which are useless 99.9% of the time and are trivial to
> install when actually needed.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /mjt