[Libguestfs] ovirt VM image to BM

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, May 19, 2022 at 12:25:53PM +0200, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 05/18/22 15:30, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > But the keyboard doesn't work.  This is also surprising because I
> > *thought* that both virt and baremetal basically use emulated or real
> > USB keyboard these days.

[This bit is wrong - on x86 under virt we emulate a PS/2 keyboard]

> The keyboard does not work -- where?
> 
> Once the OS is reached (gdm or console root prompt), or in grub
> (pre-boot, basically)?

It got all the way to gdm but apparently the keyboard didn't work for
login etc.  The baremetal server is a Dell and Guilherme was accessing
this over iDRAC.  No idea what kind of "virtual" keyboard iDRAC
presents to the hardware.

I don't know what happened in the end.  Last I heard Guilherme was
trying to reach the server over ssh.

> The latter, I can explain. UEFI has a phase called "Boot Device
> Selection" (BDS) where the firmware decides exactly what devices to
> "connect" -- meaning what devices should be *bound* by UEFI drivers.
> 
> There is a number of policies here; the gist is that the platform vendor
> can do whatever they want -- BDS is called "platform policy".
> 
> Usually they support at least two configs, "full config" and "fast
> boot". Under "fast boot", the firmware only connects such devices to
> UEFI drivers that the firmware *knows* are needed for booting, and
> ignores everything else, including newly connected devices, potentially.
> Therefore, a USB keyboard could end up "non-driven" by UEFI because it
> is not needed for booting!

Would Linux still recognise the keyboard even in "fast boot" mode?

> The fix is to get into the firmware setup UI by some other way [*], and
> either disable "fast boot", or -- if the firmware is flexible enough --
> explicitly enable the binding of USB devices.
> 
> [*] From "/etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware", the command
> 
>   grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg
> 
> should create a grub2 menu entry, usually at the end of the boot menu,
> that invokes the "fwsetup" grub2 command. The trick is to make this
> entry the default entry, once the OS has fully booted (I guess via
> GRUB_DEFAULT in "/etc/default/grub"), and then reboot. When grub2
> executes "fwsetup", it modifies a particular non-volatile UEFI global
> variable ("OsIndications"), and upon seeing that, the firmware at next
> boot will drop into the setup UI.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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