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. take care, Gerd