seabios / seabios-bin split in Fedora - why?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I'm trying to package OpenSBI RISC-V firmware for Fedora
(https://github.com/riscv/opensbi).  It's a similar situation to
SeaBIOS and other architecture firmware.  We have to cross-compile a
binary on potentially any Koji architecture, and end up with a noarch
package, because the final firmware blob can be installed on any
architecture too.

Here's my initial attempt:

  https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=36861731
  http://oirase.annexia.org/reviews/opensbi/opensbi.spec

I needed to use %global _binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 0
to stop RPM complaining about:

  error: Arch dependent binaries in noarch package

SeaBIOS uses the same workaround:

  https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seabios/blob/master/f/seabios.spec

But also it builds an empty seabios package and then builds the binary
into seabios-bin.  Does anyone remember why that was needed?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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[Paolo Bonzini]

On 08/08/19 16:14, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  I'm trying to package OpenSBI RISC-V firmware for Fedora
>  (https://github.com/riscv/opensbi).  It's a similar situation to
>  SeaBIOS and other architecture firmware.  We have to cross-compile a
>  binary on potentially any Koji architecture, and end up with a noarch
>  package, because the final firmware blob can be installed on any
>  architecture too.
>  
>  Here's my initial attempt:
>  
>    https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=36861731
>    http://oirase.annexia.org/reviews/opensbi/opensbi.spec
>  
>  I needed to use %global _binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 0
>  to stop RPM complaining about:
>  
>    error: Arch dependent binaries in noarch package
>  
>  SeaBIOS uses the same workaround:
>  
>    https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seabios/blob/master/f/seabios.spec
>  
>  But also it builds an empty seabios package and then builds the binary
>  into seabios-bin.  Does anyone remember why that was needed? 
It's just backwards compatibility.  seabios is a noarch package because
you can use it to run emulated x86 virtual machines on non-x86
architectures.  At the same time, we wanted the build to happen on an
x86 machine so that was done via the empty package + ExclusiveArch.

Fedora builds of seabios and other firmware support cross compilation
these days though, so you don't need the hack anymore.  You only need to
allow arch dependent binaries in noarch packages.  Also, please install
the binaries in /usr/share, not /usr/lib.

Paolo

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 04:22:33PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>  On 08/08/19 16:14, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  > I'm trying to package OpenSBI RISC-V firmware for Fedora
>  > (https://github.com/riscv/opensbi).  It's a similar situation to
>  > SeaBIOS and other architecture firmware.  We have to cross-compile a
>  > binary on potentially any Koji architecture, and end up with a noarch
>  > package, because the final firmware blob can be installed on any
>  > architecture too.
>  > 
>  > Here's my initial attempt:
>  > 
>  >   https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=36861731
>  >   http://oirase.annexia.org/reviews/opensbi/opensbi.spec
>  > 
>  > I needed to use %global _binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 0
>  > to stop RPM complaining about:
>  > 
>  >   error: Arch dependent binaries in noarch package
>  > 
>  > SeaBIOS uses the same workaround:
>  > 
>  >   https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seabios/blob/master/f/seabios.spec
>  > 
>  > But also it builds an empty seabios package and then builds the binary
>  > into seabios-bin.  Does anyone remember why that was needed?
>  
>  It's just backwards compatibility.  seabios is a noarch package because
>  you can use it to run emulated x86 virtual machines on non-x86
>  architectures.  At the same time, we wanted the build to happen on an
>  x86 machine so that was done via the empty package + ExclusiveArch.
>  
>  Fedora builds of seabios and other firmware support cross compilation
>  these days though, so you don't need the hack anymore.  You only need to
>  allow arch dependent binaries in noarch packages.  Also, please install
>  the binaries in /usr/share, not /usr/lib. 
If it is just backwards compat, how about we kill the -bin RPM now
to make it clearer to understand

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
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[Richard W.M. Jones]

Thanks everyone.  I've made some changes which were suggested and have
filed a package review.  Let's continue discussion on the BZ:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1739133

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 03:14:15PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  I'm trying to package OpenSBI RISC-V firmware for Fedora
>  (https://github.com/riscv/opensbi).  It's a similar situation to
>  SeaBIOS and other architecture firmware.  We have to cross-compile a
>  binary on potentially any Koji architecture, and end up with a noarch
>  package, because the final firmware blob can be installed on any
>  architecture too.
>  
>  Here's my initial attempt:
>  
>    https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=36861731
>    http://oirase.annexia.org/reviews/opensbi/opensbi.spec
>  
>  I needed to use %global _binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build 0
>  to stop RPM complaining about:
>  
>    error: Arch dependent binaries in noarch package
>  
>  SeaBIOS uses the same workaround:
>  
>    https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/seabios/blob/master/f/seabios.spec
>  
>  But also it builds an empty seabios package and then builds the binary
>  into seabios-bin.  Does anyone remember why that was needed? 
Originally we were using the native compilers, which meant we could
only build it on an x86 host. Thus the main seabios package was
ExclusiveArch %{ix86} x86_64.  QEMU's TCG emulators though needed
the resulting firmware available on every arch, so we added the
ROM to the seabios-bin sub-RPM which was Buildarch: noarch.

It thus forced koji to pick an x86 host, but still gave us a noarch
result.

No longer after this though, we switched to using cross compilers,
so I'm not seeing the obvious need to keep this split -bin anymore.

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
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