State "bios" firmware support for OSes

Fabiano Fidêncio fidencio at redhat.com
Tue May 26 22:30:00 UTC 2020


On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 4:10 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 04:05:05PM +0200, Felipe Borges wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > We recently landed EFI support in GNOME Boxes where we create guests
> > with "firmware = efi" by default when libosinfo reports that the OS
> > supports it. This has worked great except for the regression with
> > snapshots. Long story short, internal snapshots won't work with EFI,
> > external snapshots won't allow our users to revert their domain to a
> > certain snapshot.
> >
> > For this reason, the Boxes designers and I concluded that the best
> > approach for us here would be to only create EFI guests for OSes that
> > REQUIRE it. If an OS can still boot with the legacy "bios" we should
> > go for it, since it maintains our Snapshot management functionality.
> >
> > The reason I am emailing libosinfo about this is to assess whether you
> > folk would be open to having me adding <firmware arch="x86_64"
> > type="bios"/> to the OSes that support it (some of them already state
> > support for EFI).
> >
> > Since the API returns a list of Osinfo.Firmware objects, we won't need
> > any more work on libosinfo side in order to implement what we need in
> > Boxes.
> >
> > All in all, adding <firmware arch="x86_64" type="bios"/> to some OSes
> > would be something you'd accept?
>
> Yes, I was pretty much expecting we would need to add such info at some
> point.
>
> Might it be easier to ask which OS do NOT support BIOS ?
>
> IOW, should we blindly add it to essentially every single OS, except for
> the very few known to not support it any more.

Oh! I should have read the whole thread before answering.
Well, +1 for this approach.

Best Regards,
-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio





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