Re: [Qemu-devel] OVMF Google Summer of Code ideas

[Jordan Justen]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 01:48, Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden> 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...)

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.

Thanks,

-Jordan