[vfio-users] OVMF and Windows hibernation

[Laszlo Ersek]

On 09/14/17 17:01, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I'm interested in getting hibernation or Fast Boot working on my
> Windows 10 VM, however on trying to enable it using "powercfg" I get
> the message "The system firmware does not support hibernation". I'm
> using OVMF (edk2-ovmf-20170209git296153c5-3.fc26.noarch).
> 
> Can I do anything about this?

You shouldn't try.


* OVMF supports S3 ("suspend to RAM", "sleep").

In order for Windows to go to sleep (i.e., offer to go into ACPI S3
power state), QEMU has to be configured correctly (with upstream QEMU,
nothing should be done for that, S3 is enabled by default). Furthermore,
all OS drivers, in particular the video driver, has to support S3. If
you use the QXL WDDM driver (and only QXL cards), then S3 should work
reliably.

If you use an assigned GPU (with its matching OS-level vendor driver),
then it might or might not work. I don't have the slightest clue.


* OVMF does not support S4 ("suspend to disk", "hibernation", "fast
boot") at this time.

Even if you could convince Windows to hibernate, your next boot-up
wouldn't be clean.

We did some work on a prerequisite feature
<https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386>, but no approach
was found that satisfied all OVMF maintainers. So this has been stuck
for a while.

(But, even if S4 worked with a VM using only emulated devices, I
couldn't guess if it worked when using an assigned device.)

Thanks
Laszlo