[vfio-users] Awful boot times, current OVMF to blame?

[John Koelndorfer]

An update:

The slow boot does not occur if I remove host devices from the virtual
machine (without any other configuration changes). It doesn't matter
whether GPU, USB, or both are passed in. Any device being passed in at all
triggers the problem, so it's something related to the physical device
passthrough I think.

An older version of OVMF did not help, nor did booting a non-Windows OS. I
tried two alternate versions of OVMF from here:
https://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=edk2-ovmf. One from
2016 November, one from 2016 April. I initially did my last VFIO setup in
2016 July.

I also tried the pc-i440fx machine, per Hristo's suggestion (though I tried
2.6, which was what my last configuration used).

Hristo, it seems your setup is very similar to mine, so I have a few
questions for you:

* Are you using libvirt?
* Could you send the qemu arguments for your VM?
* What are your kernel boot parameters?

My suspicion now is that libvirt is doing some extra configuration that I'm
not. I looked at my old libvirt XML file and nothing is jumping out at me,
so maybe it's a hardcoded default behavior.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far, folks.

On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 4:03 PM, Hagbard Celine <hagbardcelin at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi, just registered to the list to share my experience on this;
>
> I've been getting my OVMF builds from kraxel.org since
> edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20150804.b1143.g8ca1489.noarch.rpm and was
> regularly updating when new builds came.
> Somwhere around edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20151221.b1390.g5ba9f06.noarch.rpm
> boot with large amounts of memory got slower.
> And around edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20160324.b1634.g3decba3.noarch.rpm the
> EFI part of boot could last about 15min with 16GB assigned to VM out
> of a total of 32GB. Lovering the assigned memory for VM to below 8GB
> resulted in normal boot times.
>
> PS. The version numbers are approximations, my recollection is not exact.
>
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