Re: [Qemu-devel] OVMF Google Summer of Code ideas

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Jordan Justen <jljusten@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 01:48, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jordan, UEFI guest firmware comes up periodically.  It seems to be a
>> feature that will be required in the future but as of today I don't
>> know of QEMU developers who are working on or using it.
>>
>> Maybe you can start by giving an update on where OVMF stands today,
>> what the roadmap is, and where collaboration/integration with QEMU is
>> necessary?
>
> The status today is that we can boot UEFI Linux with qemu or kvm on
> IA-32 & X64 pretty reliably.
>
> The biggest issue for UEFI Linux seems to be getting distributions to
> ship UEFI compatible ISO images.  However, there seems to be some
> progress here.  For instance 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10's ISO is UEFI
> bootable.
>
> UEFI Windows 7 still does not boot on OVMF, and this is still a big open issue.
>
> One other OVMF issue that requires some help on the VM side is that we
> cannot support true non-volatile variables in OVMF due to a lack of
> flash support in QEMU/KVM.
>
> The biggest issue that you guys care about for OVMF is a lack of
> legacy bios compatibility (CSM).  There has been no progress in this
> area.  (However, it has now been suggested by someone on our dev list
> for a potential Google Summer of Code project.  We will have to see if
> anything comes of this...)

That would be cool.  Is there a way to just embed SeaBIOS?  Or do the
UEFI APIs still need to be around when CSM kicks in?

> In terms of a forward looking 'roadmap,' I'm sure that the UEFI Linux
> situation should only improve as more and more x86/x86-64 systems are
> shipped with UEFI available.  We will continue to try to improve UEFI
> Linux, and hopefully distributions will be able to leverage OVMF for
> UEFI compatibility testing.
>
> Clearly we hope to resolve the UEFI Win7 boot issue, or possibly
> address UEFI booting with Win8.
>
> Regarding the non-volatile variables issue, I have been trying to
> develop a proposal for addressing this with a change to QEMU's
> hardware support of bios.bin.  But, I don't have the suggestion (or
> implementation) ready at this time.

Sounds like something to keep discussing with the QEMU and SeaBIOS
communities.  Gleb Natapov and Kevin O'Connor have done a lot of the
recent BIOS and firmware interface work.  I think persistent CMOS has
come up several times and might be similar to non-volatile UEFI
storage.

Stefan