EFI through virtualization?

EFI through virtualization?

[Jerone Young]

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You guys wouldn't happen to know any good ways to test out EFI through
virtualization. I see some Qemu stuff that is rather old. But I'm not too
trusting of it's funcationality now. I'd like to play around and test/debug
some of the grub2 efi support, without having to buy a Mac. Any ideas?

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Re: EFI through virtualization?

[Robert Millan]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 11:10:25PM -0600, Jerone Young wrote:
> You guys wouldn't happen to know any good ways to test out EFI through
> virtualization. I see some Qemu stuff that is rather old. But I'm not too
> trusting of it's funcationality now. I'd like to play around and test/debug
> some of the grub2 efi support, without having to buy a Mac. Any ideas?

I wouldn't be overly concerned about hacking on EFI unless you're going to
use it yourself.  Keep in mind that EFI is a proprietary system (even moreso
than BIOS).  It's good that EFI users are able to run GRUB on it, and that
GRUB works well for them, but we shouldn't consider EFI one of our first
priorities IMO.

The FSF is actively endoring free firmware like coreboot instead:

  http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html

  (note this text also mentions EFI)

I'm not a GRUB maintainer, but being a GNU project I think our priority after
i386/BIOS should be supporting coreboot.  I expect the maintainers would agree
with that.

That said, it's your time not mine.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."