[libvirt] [PATCH 0/4] allow OVMF users to disable qemu's "-boot strict=on"
Daniel P. Berrange
berrange at redhat.com
Tue Jan 28 12:10:22 UTC 2014
On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 05:25:18PM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 01/23/14 15:58, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>
> I disagree that users setting their persistent boot variables form
> inside the guest fall in the same category. That feature is an
> unalienable part of UEFI.
>
> > The goal we have is that the XML description should fully describe
> > the configuration of a VM. Having a situation where the XML config
> > only partially describes the setup, and the rest is delegated to
> > a config embedded in the firmware image is not something we wish
> > to support.
>
> I understand.
>
> > IMHO what we need to tackle here is the inability to properly
> > configure the firmware boot order from QEMU / libvirt. ie make
> > it possible for users to fully control it via libvirt XML.
>
> We'd face two hurdles towards this goal.
>
> - The first is that you'd need to get a basically free-form string
> through. Technically it wouldn't be very hard, but it's completely
> foreign from the current bootindex concept in libvirt/qemu.
>
> In UEFI, "bootable device" can refer to something that's just a chunk of
> guest RAM for qemu.
>
> - The second hurdle is that you couldn't *offer* the host-side user sane
> choices (device paths for UEFI boot options) beyond a limit. This is
> because device paths come to existence by the execution and stacking of
> UEFI drivers, and their binding to devices.
Ok, I think I understand the problem more now. Would there be any sense
in defining an generic <boot dev="config"/> option to indicate that UEFI
should try the config settings that the user has defined inside the UEFI
config partition ? If we use the strict=on|off setting, the user's config
settings are only usable as the very last fallback option, once all the
explicitly listed options have been tried. If we had a <boot dev="config">
we would perhaps be able to express ordering such as
<boot dev="hd">
<boot dev="config">
<boot dev="cdrom">
without having to invent a impossibly complicated grammer to express all
possible UEFI bootable device options ?
Regards,
Daniel
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