[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#858962: Request: enable OVMF at build time in 4.8 as it does not require non-free anymore

[John Keates]

Package: src:xen
Version: 4.8.1~pre.2017.01.23-1
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

In Xen 4.8 it is possible to enable OVMF without the need for any OVMF code or binary to be on the system.
Currently, OVMF is not enabled, probably because it used to require OVMF at compile time which would
make for a hard dependency on non-free code. Since this is no longer the case, you could make it a run-time
option by enabling OVMF for this package, and when a user would want to actually use it, they would only need
to add a OVMF binary to a preset path themselves (i.e. by installing the non-free ovmf package).

I tested this on a strech machine, by getting the sources using apt-get source and editing debian/rules.real.
Around line 74 the compile-time options for Xen are listed, and enabling OVMF is as simple as adding one line:

                        --enable-ovmf --with-system-ovmf=/usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd

The path specified does not need to exist at compile time. In this case I chose to use the path where the OVMF package
installs the binary firmware file so it can be automatically used.

I'm not sure how to create a .patch file for this, but since it's one line with very clear results, I hope it's sufficient.

Regards,
John Keates

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (650, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.8.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

xen-hypervisor-4.8-amd64 depends on no packages.

Versions of packages xen-hypervisor-4.8-amd64 recommends:
ii  xen-utils-4.8  4.8.1~pre.2017.01.23-1

xen-hypervisor-4.8-amd64 suggests no packages.

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/grub.d/xen.cfg changed [not included]

-- no debconf information