[libvirt] [PATCH 0/4] allow OVMF users to disable qemu's "-boot strict=on"

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:47:41PM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 01/22/14 11:45, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 01:33:18AM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> >> Recently,
> >>
> >>   commit 96fddee322c7d39a57cfdc5e7be71326d597d30a
> >>   Author: Laine Stump <laine at laine.org>
> >>   Date:   Mon Dec 2 14:07:12 2013 +0200
> >>
> >>       qemu: add "-boot strict" to commandline whenever possible
> >>
> >> introduced a regression for OVMF guests. The symptoms and causes are
> >> described in patch 3/4, and in
> >>
> >>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1056258
> >>
> >> Let's allow users to opt-out of "-boot strict=on" while preserving it as
> >> default.
> > 
> > I don't really get from that bug description why this can't be
> > made to work as desired in OVMF. It seems like its is just a
> > bug in the OVMF impl that it doesn't work.
> 
> Have you read the description in patch 3 too?
> 
> The basic idea of HALT is that you specify everything in the fw_cfg file
> that you want to boot from, and expect that the firmware attempt no
> other option to boot. This assumes that you are able to *express* all
> places that you want to boot from in the fw_cfg boot specification.
> 
> Under UEFI there are places to boot from that you simply cannot express
> in fw_cfg. If you specify HALT, then you'll never reach those places,
> not even as fallbacks. And users do want to reach those places as fallbacks.

That is a pretty nebulous statement which I find hard to believe. We have
a list of device types to attempt boot from (floppy/disk/cdrom/network)
or a list of device instance boot order priorities. I fail to see  how
OVMF can be incapable of figuring that out.

Regards,
Daniel
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