Re: Moving QEMU downloads to GitLab Releases?

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 09:21:30AM +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> > > I guess the main question is who is using the ROM/BIOS sources in the
> > > tarballs, and would this 2-step process work for those users? If there
> > > are distros relying on them then maybe there are some more logistics to
> > > consider since the make-release downloads are both time-consuming and
> > > prone to network errors/stalls since it relies on the availability of a
> > > good number of different hosts.
> > 
> > Great, maybe Gerd can comment on splitting out firmware.
> 
> I think the binaries are mostly a convenience feature for developers.
> Distros typically build from source anyway, and typically they build
> from upstream source instead of qemu submodule.
> 
> The idea to split them out to a separate repo is exists for quite a
> while.  I have an old qemu-firmware repo laying around on my disk, which
> basically moves roms/ + submodules and the binaries built from it over.
> 
> I think with the switch to gitlab it doesn't make sense any more to
> commit pre-built firmware binaries to a git repo.  Instead we should
> build the firmware in gitlab ci, i.e. effectively move the build rules
> we have right now in roms/Makefile to .gitlab-ci.d/, then publish the
> firmware binaries as build artifacts or gitlab pages.
> 
> When done just remove the pre-build binaries from git and add a helper
> script to fetch firmware binaries from gitlab instead.
> 
> > QEMU mirrors firmware sources on GitLab too. We're able to provide the
> > same level of download availability on our mirror firmware repos as for
> > the main qemu.git repo.
> 
> I think enabling CI for the firmware mirrors should work given that it
> is possible to specify a custom CI/CD configuration file, i.e. use
> something like
> 
>     /qemu-project/qemu/.gitlab-ci.d/firmware/seabios.yml
> 
> or
> 
>     /qemu-project/qemu-firmware/seabios.yml
> 
> as config file for the 
> 
>     /qemu-project/seabios/
> 
> mirror.  Then we can publish binaries using gitlab pages at
> 
>     https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/seabios/
> 
> That way we also don't need the roms/ submodules any more, i.e. we
> can remove both sources and binaries for the firmware from the
> release tarballs.

Thanks!

For developer convenience it would be nice to avoid manual steps after
git clone qemu.git. Maybe ./configure should check for firmware blobs
and automatically download them. There could be a ./configure
--disable-firmware-download option that distros can use to skip the
download when building everything from source.

Stefan

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