Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Config.mk: update OVMF changeset

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2015-10-23 at 12:18 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Stefano Stabellini writes ("Re: [PATCH] Config.mk: update OVMF
> changeset"):
> > On Fri, 23 Oct 2015, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > Yes. Those (that?) and the reasons why we aren't just trivially
> > > taking them
> > > are explained in the referenced thread.
> 
> That explanation isn't very convincing to me.
> 
> > I cannot believe we are going to move forward without a way to
> > introduce
> > any OVMF fixes into the  stable branches.
> 
> It is fine to introduce OVMF fixes into stable branches, of course.
> 
> But it is not fine to introduce other upstream changes to OVMF,
> willy-nilly.
> 
> Obviously these two requirements cannot be satisfied without there
> being some branch of OVMF which contains the intended fixes, without
> the unwanted upstream development.

For things which we released as part of a stable release I completely
agree.

But OVMF for aarch64 was not part of the 4.6 release. We have no existing
stable baseline for that arch, and no testing or reason to believe that
cb9a7eb (the Config.mk version currently referenced by 4.6) as being any
good at all on that platform, whether we backport a couple of fixes to it
or not.

I'm not convinced that taking some arbitrary old (although not as old as I
thought) OVMF tree which we have tested to our satisfaction and released on
x86, slapping a couple of arm64 backports on it and saying "this is now a
good and stable thing to use on arm64" makes it good enough to release as
ovmf arm64 in 4.6.1, encouraging our users to go about using etc.

Far better to be honest about it for now and point arm64 users at a more
bleeding edge ovmf release outside of our own stable releases and prepare
to do something better in 4.7.

> If OVMF upstream do not have such a branch, we need to create one.

Ian.

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