On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:54 AM, Jordan Justen <jljus...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 01:48, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefa...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Jordan, UEFI guest firmware comes up periodically. It seems to be a >> feature that will be required in the future but as of today I don't >> know of QEMU developers who are working on or using it. >> >> Maybe you can start by giving an update on where OVMF stands today, >> what the roadmap is, and where collaboration/integration with QEMU is >> necessary? > > The status today is that we can boot UEFI Linux with qemu or kvm on > IA-32 & X64 pretty reliably. > > The biggest issue for UEFI Linux seems to be getting distributions to > ship UEFI compatible ISO images. However, there seems to be some > progress here. For instance 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10's ISO is UEFI > bootable. > > UEFI Windows 7 still does not boot on OVMF, and this is still a big open > issue. > > One other OVMF issue that requires some help on the VM side is that we > cannot support true non-volatile variables in OVMF due to a lack of > flash support in QEMU/KVM. > > The biggest issue that you guys care about for OVMF is a lack of > legacy bios compatibility (CSM). There has been no progress in this > area. (However, it has now been suggested by someone on our dev list > for a potential Google Summer of Code project. We will have to see if > anything comes of this...)
That would be cool. Is there a way to just embed SeaBIOS? Or do the UEFI APIs still need to be around when CSM kicks in? > In terms of a forward looking 'roadmap,' I'm sure that the UEFI Linux > situation should only improve as more and more x86/x86-64 systems are > shipped with UEFI available. We will continue to try to improve UEFI > Linux, and hopefully distributions will be able to leverage OVMF for > UEFI compatibility testing. > > Clearly we hope to resolve the UEFI Win7 boot issue, or possibly > address UEFI booting with Win8. > > Regarding the non-volatile variables issue, I have been trying to > develop a proposal for addressing this with a change to QEMU's > hardware support of bios.bin. But, I don't have the suggestion (or > implementation) ready at this time. Sounds like something to keep discussing with the QEMU and SeaBIOS communities. Gleb Natapov and Kevin O'Connor have done a lot of the recent BIOS and firmware interface work. I think persistent CMOS has come up several times and might be similar to non-volatile UEFI storage. Stefan
