Re: [PATCH v4 2/2] efi: new 'eficonnect' command

[Robbie Harwood <rharwood@redhat.com>]

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Renaud Métrich <rmetrich@redhat.com> writes:

> When efi.quickboot is enabled on VMWare (which is the default for
> hardware release 16 and later), it may happen that not all EFI devices
> are connected. Due to this, browsing the devices in make_devices() just
> fails to find devices, in particular disks or partitions for a given
> disk.
> This typically happens when network booting, then trying to chainload to
> local disk (this is used in deployment tools such as Red Hat Satellite),
> which is done through using the following grub.cfg snippet:
> -------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
> unset prefix
> search --file --set=prefix /EFI/redhat/grubx64.efi
> if [ -n "$prefix" ]; then
>   chainloader ($prefix)/EFI/redhat/grubx64/efi
> ...
> -------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
>
> With efi.quickboot, none of the devices are connected, causing "search"
> to fail. Sometimes devices are connected but not the partition of the
> disk matching $prefix, causing partition to not be found by
> "chainloader".
>
> This patch introduces a new "eficonnect pciroot|scsi|all" command whic
> recursively connects all EFI devices starting from a given controller
> type:
> - if 'pciroot' is specified, recursion is performed for all PCI root
>   handles
> - if 'scsi' is specified, recursion is performed for all SCSI I/O
>   handles (recommended usage to avoid connecting unwanted handles which
>   may impact Grub performances)
> - if 'all' is specified, recursion is performed on all handles (not
>   recommended since it may heavily impact Grub performances)
>
> Typical grub.cfg snippet would then be:
> -------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
> eficonnect scsi
> unset prefix
> search --file --set=prefix /EFI/redhat/grubx64.efi
> if [ -n "$prefix" ]; then
>   chainloader ($prefix)/EFI/redhat/grubx64/efi
> ...
> -------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
>
> The code is easily extensible to handle other arguments in the future if
> needed.

(The first patch doesn't apply to upstream - I assume it was sent by
accident?)

I wanted to call out here that we're already shipping this command in
RHEL under the name in previous versions (i.e., connectefi).  Renaud,
you probably know better than I do how much difficulty would be involved
in changing that for customers, so I'll defer to you on whether that's
okay.

Be well,
--Robbie

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