Bug#685134: Bug#684909: Bug#685134: [s390-tools] please add patch from qemu

On 19 October 2017 at 15:31, Philipp Kern <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 10/19/2017 03:06 PM, Michael Tokarev wrote:
>> Debian has much stricter policy wrt blobs (DFSG),
>> and debian builds for more architectures (the firmware,
>> if it is part of qemu-system-s390 package, needs to be
>> built on all architectures where this binary package
>> builts, or it needs to be a separate arch-all package).
>
> Note that the arch:all autobuilders are amd64. gcc-*-s390x-linux-gnu
> exists in Debian, although only on i386 and amd64. I don't think there's
> a policy today that precludes you from forcing users to build arch:all
> on amd64 for technical reasons.
>
> Kind regards
> Philipp Kern
>

The s390x firmware in question, is built from source, on Ubuntu, on
every src:qemu upload on the s390x architecture and shipped in an
arch:s390x package.

qemu-system-s390x requires to run on the s390x hardware, as it is
effectively passthrough kvm only, and is not userspace emulated.
(Does not work on non-s390x machines).

Therefore src:qemu should build s390x specific firmware and ship in
arch:s390x package as if it is an s390x-specific binary.

Stuff about arch:all autobilders etc do not in practice cause any
constraints here since this particular firmware is useless in a non
_s390x.deb.

There are no plans to make qemu-system-s390x able to perform userspace
emulation on non-s390x architectures.