Re: [PATCH] Report any problems with loading the VGA driver for PPC Macintosh targets

From: Programmingkid <programmingkidx@gmail.com>
To: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>,
	Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland@ilande.co.uk>,
	Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>,
	David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>,
	qemu-ppc <qemu-ppc@nongnu.org>,
	QEMU Developers <qemu-devel@nongnu.org>,
	Howard Spoelstra <hsp.cat7@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Report any problems with loading the VGA driver for PPC Macintosh targets
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2021 11:50:17 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8C4A73A1-22A7-4EC9-B561-F8487D56E8A9@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAFEAcA96V6d-aAR65xiZQrB65aTfQEJfHq5x_ZSa3mpAoSUMQw@mail.gmail.com>

> On Aug 30, 2021, at 4:59 PM, Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 30 Aug 2021 at 21:29, Programmingkid <programmingkidx@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I found out that there are two pc-bios folders. One in the root directory
>> and one in the build directory. QEMU is looking in the pc-bios folder
>> located inside the build folder. The qemu_vga.ndrv file is only located
>> in the root directory pc-bios folder. I think a good solution to this
>> issue is to first remove one of the pc-bios folders. I'm not sure if it
>> is just me who has two pc-bios folders or if everyone does.
> 
> Having two pc-bios folders is expected. The one in the source tree is
> the one which has the files we actually carry around in git. The one
> in the build tree is created by 'configure' and populated with symbolic
> links back to the files in the source tree. We need this one because
> the QEMU executable doesn't (and shouldn't) know where the source tree is:
> when it is looking for files it will look in places relative to the
> location of the executable itself (ie relative to the build tree)
> as well as places set by configure (used when you install QEMU and
> its various supporting files).
> 
> The reason qemu_vga.ndrv is not in the pc-bios folder in the build
> tree is because when that file was added we forgot to add handling
> for it in configure. I'm not sure why nobody else has fallen over
> this in the intervening 3 years: running QEMU from the build tree
> will never find the file, and it will not be installed via
> 'make install' either.
> 
> (The pc-bios symlink stuff is a bit of a mess, as the comment about
> it in configure notes. Perhaps meson now offers a cleaner way to
> handle this? In particular pc-bios/meson.build already has to carry
> around a complete list of all the bios blobs, so it could probably
> create the symlink farm itself.)
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM

I did try working on the pc-bios/meson.build file. I deleted all the entries in the 'blobs' list. Then I ran './configure --target-list=ppc-softmmu && make -j 9'. The pc-bios folder in the build directory was still populated with all the files (except for qemu_vga.ndrv). Anyone knows what exactly populates the pc-bios folder in the build folder?