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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 05:25:18PM +0100, Laszlo Ersek wrote:
> On 01/23/14 15:58, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 
> I disagree that users setting their persistent boot variables form
> inside the guest fall in the same category. That feature is an
> unalienable part of UEFI.
> 
> > The goal we have is that the XML description should fully describe
> > the configuration of a VM. Having a situation where the XML config
> > only partially describes the setup, and the rest is delegated to
> > a config embedded in the firmware image is not something we wish
> > to support.
> 
> I understand.
> 
> > IMHO what we need to tackle here is the inability to properly
> > configure the firmware boot order from QEMU / libvirt. ie make
> > it possible for users to fully control it via libvirt XML.
> 
> We'd face two hurdles towards this goal.
> 
> - The first is that you'd need to get a basically free-form string
> through. Technically it wouldn't be very hard, but it's completely
> foreign from the current bootindex concept in libvirt/qemu.
> 
> In UEFI, "bootable device" can refer to something that's just a chunk of
> guest RAM for qemu.
> 
> - The second hurdle is that you couldn't *offer* the host-side user sane
> choices (device paths for UEFI boot options) beyond a limit. This is
> because device paths come to existence by the execution and stacking of
> UEFI drivers, and their binding to devices.

Ok, I think I understand the problem more now. Would there be any sense
in defining an generic <boot dev="config"/> option to indicate that UEFI
should try the config settings that the user has defined inside the UEFI
config partition ? If we use the strict=on|off setting, the user's config
settings are only usable as the very last fallback option, once all the
explicitly listed options have been tried. If we had a <boot dev="config">
we would perhaps be able to express ordering such as

   <boot dev="hd">
   <boot dev="config">
   <boot dev="cdrom">

without having to invent a impossibly complicated grammer to express all
possible UEFI bootable device options ?

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|