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

[Ian Jackson]

Control: tags -1 patch

John Keates writes ("Bug#858962: Request: enable OVMF at build time in 4.8 as it does not require non-free anymore"):
> Package: src:xen
> Version: 4.8.1~pre.2017.01.23-1
> Severity: wishlist

Hi.  Thanks for the report.

> 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 looked into this OVMF nonfreeness and it seems to be fixed:
  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815618

> 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.

Thanks for this testing.

I think that, given that UEFI is becoming quite common, it might be
worth adding a dependency of some kind to the Debian Xen packages, as
well as simply enabling ovmf support.  But that's probably not a
blocker for fixing this.

> 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.

Indeed.

However: I do not intend to make this change at this stage of the
stretch release freeze.

If you (or someone else) gets preapproval from the release team, then
I would be prepared to do.  But I think such approval would probably
be refused for good reasons.  If someone wants to make such an
approval request, please let me know and I may be able to help
pre-review it etc. - on the condition that this isn't taken as
endorsement :-).

Thanks,
Ian.