Comment 27 for bug 513273

Dustin,

You said: "Upstream QEMU recommends that we use the bundled vgabios.bin and bios.bin in their tarball.

However, these binary blobs are generated by GPLv2 code that is not part of the release tarball.

Per Ubuntu policy, we are not allowed to ship binary blobs without the associated source code."

Obviously, we must comply with our own policy, but removing these blobs cripples our qemu packages to supporting only a very small subset of architectures for the qemu binaries we ship, not to mention not fixing this bug. Would it not be possible to create two new source packages using the same versions of bios sources and compilation options that upstream uses? Eg, we obtain the upstream sources that the qemu team has blessed and put appropriately licensed sources in qemu-kvm-roms for main and the rest in qemu-kvm-roms-extras in multiverse. Then talk to upstream qemu on how they generated their blessed versions and do the same. This would fix this bug, bring us into compliance with our own policy and restore full functionality to qemu.