Getting the QEMU package building on Power (problems with iasl)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 11:05:10AM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> As I understand it, the QEMU package isn't building on Power for F18.
> This is because of a dependency on SeaBIOS for qemu-system-x86_64.
> 
> SeaBIOS cannot build on PPC (even with cross compilers) because it
> depends on iasl.  iasl currently fails spectacularly on a big endian
> host.
> 
> There are a few options to get the ball rolling here:
> 
> 1) Richard is trying out a new version of iasl since what ships in
>    Fedora is pretty old.  No guarantee that it's going to work any better.

I don't get the impression that upstream care at all about the
ppc64 case.  No surprises there.

Rather unrelated, I have just pushed the latest iasl package into
Fedora (x86-64 ONLY though).

> 2) We could conditionally disable the SeaBIOS dependency for PPC hosts
>    which would break qemu-system-x86_64 on PPC hosts functionally.
> 
> 3) We could pursue an exception for including binaries from the QEMU
>    source package in the RPM packages.  This had been previously
>    discussed and Tom Callaway suggested a wording for a such an
>    exception:
> 
>    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/packaging/2012-July/008558.html
> 
>    The context in that discussion was actually SLOF, not SeaBIOS.  The
>    exception wasn't pursued because PPC cross compilers were able to be
>    used for SLOF.

Also note that it's not really a binary.  It's just that the package
(seabios-bin) would have to be compiled, from source, on a different
architecture, and then the result imported as a binary into the ppc64
buildroot.

> (3) seems like the best path forward to me.  I assume that Cole, as the
> QEMU package maintainer, would need to take this forward.  (2) could be
> used as an interim solution but I don't know how long it takes to get an
> exception approved so perhaps that's not necessary.

Agreed with (3).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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