[vfio-users] Windows 7 successfully migrated from BIOS to OVMF/UEFI

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On May 16, 2016 12:27 PM, "Leonhard Preis" <leonhard at pre.is> wrote:
>
> My dear fellow vfio users,
>
> today I want to share my success[1] with you. In case you have Windows 7
and currently use BIOS but would like to switch to UEFI or are about to set
up your first Windows VM with passthrough and would prefer Windows 7 over
Windows 8 and above, rejoice: It’s working just fine.
~A lot of text cut.

Windows 7 has an EFI compatible bootloader, but the OS doesn't support GOP,
using VBE when there are no drivers installed.
Thanks to edk2 dev team, we have a shim which captures all VBE actions and
pushes them to QXL even without CSM enabled.
Since you are migrating, your installation already has drivers installed,
so all this stuff is hidden from you.
Second - you do NOT need to flash your GPU for two reasons:
1. you have installed the drivers already, they don't care about GOP, EFI,
VBE, CSM...
2. you can just append it via options in the command line or in libvirt xml.

There are numerous ways to install or "migrate" W7 to UEFI, your GPU
actually doesn't actually need to have an EFI driver in its' ROM.

Moreover, if there is no ROM available, you can craft it manually by taking
an old-but-working efi driver from some other card's ROM and appending it
to your card's ROM using EfiRom from edk2-tools.
I've seen a presentation from amd dating back to 2011 saying that all EFI
drivers providing GOP will be universal, and they are now.

Please note that some versions of it are broken, for example ASUS
HD7750-DCSL-1 which i have.

This all was talked over on archlinux forum.
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