[Pkg-xen-devel] Bug#858962: Bug#858962: enabling OVMF - 4.10+

[John Keates]

Excellent! Good to see you got the serial console working as well. 
There are a bunch of extra options like allowing custom nvram per-vm (normally it’s just one read-only nvram for all instances),
but those aren’t important right now, basic EFI domu booting is pretty fair to get in Debian first.

John

> On 1 Mar 2018, at 00:14, Hans van Kranenburg <hans at knorrie.org> wrote:
> 
> Hey,
> 
> On 02/28/2018 12:59 AM, John Keates wrote:
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> 1. Install Xen with OVMF support
>> 2. Install OVMF (which basically just gets you the binary file, package is called ovmf)
>> 3. Get an EFI-bootable image, the Debian Netinstall image will probably do fine
>> 3. Create a domU config like this:
>> 
>> name = 'uefi-domu-thingy'
>> bios = "ovmf"
>> builder = 'hvm'
>> memory = '512'
>> vcpus = 1
>> 
>> Then sudo xl create <whateveryoucalledit.cfg>
>> 
>> This should start the domu, and since there is no disk, just get to the UEFI shell and idle around and not do much else. You can connect to it over VNC, but I’m sure it can be started in UEFI text mode too so you get UEFI access via the serial console.
> 
> Ok, as promised, I tried.
> 
> For Xen 4.10, I ended up with:
> 
> name = 'uefi-domu-thingy'
> bios = "ovmf"
> type = 'hvm'
> memory = '512'
> vcpus = 1
> vnc=1
> vnclisten='0.0.0.0'
> serial='pty'
> 
> I installed the qemu packages that Mark Pryor already rebuilt as test
> (which use libxen 4.10).
> 
> When doing xen create -c on that, I get a serial console to it:
> 
> UEFI Interactive Shell v2.2
> EDK II
> UEFI v2.70 (EDK II, 0x00010000)
> Mapping table
>     BLK0: Alias(s):
>          PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Floppy(0x0)
>     BLK1: Alias(s):
>          PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1,0x0)/Floppy(0x1)
> Press ESC in 1 seconds to skip startup.nsh or any other key to continue.
> Shell>
> 
> A vnc connection also shows an ugly screen which a copy of the output.
> 
> Step 2: Use a disk
> 
> I simply added...
> disk = ['file:/yolo/ovmf/debian-9.3.0-amd64-netinst.iso,xvda']
> 
> and now the serial console shows a purple blinking cursor, and the vnc
> connection shows a graphical Debian GNU/Linux UEFI Installer menu.
> 
> Great success!
> 
> Hans