[vfio-users] Awful boot times, current OVMF to blame?

[John Koelndorfer]

Good news, folks!

Hagbard was kind enough to send an older build of OVMF he had lying around
and suggested I try it. I did, and I am happy to report my VM boots very
fast again! For safekeeping, I have committed it to my GitHub repository:
https://github.com/jkoelndorfer/local-tools/blob/master/workstation/vfio/edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20150804.b1143.g8ca1489.noarch.rpm.
I believe that when I did my initial VFIO setup, I used a package from the
AUR which may have been just old enough to avoid the problem.

I may experiment some and see if any of the qemu parameters provided by
Hristo make a difference with a current version of OVMF. For now, I'm happy
my VM is booting quickly.

Thanks very much for your help.

On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 7:22 PM, John Koelndorfer <jkoelndorfer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> An update:
>
> The slow boot does not occur if I remove host devices from the virtual
> machine (without any other configuration changes). It doesn't matter
> whether GPU, USB, or both are passed in. Any device being passed in at all
> triggers the problem, so it's something related to the physical device
> passthrough I think.
>
> An older version of OVMF did not help, nor did booting a non-Windows OS. I
> tried two alternate versions of OVMF from here:
> https://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=edk2-ovmf. One
> from 2016 November, one from 2016 April. I initially did my last VFIO setup
> in 2016 July.
>
> I also tried the pc-i440fx machine, per Hristo's suggestion (though I
> tried 2.6, which was what my last configuration used).
>
> Hristo, it seems your setup is very similar to mine, so I have a few
> questions for you:
>
> * Are you using libvirt?
> * Could you send the qemu arguments for your VM?
> * What are your kernel boot parameters?
>
> My suspicion now is that libvirt is doing some extra configuration that
> I'm not. I looked at my old libvirt XML file and nothing is jumping out at
> me, so maybe it's a hardcoded default behavior.
>
> Thanks for all the suggestions so far, folks.
>
> On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 4:03 PM, Hagbard Celine <hagbardcelin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi, just registered to the list to share my experience on this;
>>
>> I've been getting my OVMF builds from kraxel.org since
>> edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20150804.b1143.g8ca1489.noarch.rpm and was
>> regularly updating when new builds came.
>> Somwhere around edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20151221.b1390.g5ba9f06.noarch.rpm
>> boot with large amounts of memory got slower.
>> And around edk2.git-ovmf-x64-0-20160324.b1634.g3decba3.noarch.rpm the
>> EFI part of boot could last about 15min with 16GB assigned to VM out
>> of a total of 32GB. Lovering the assigned memory for VM to below 8GB
>> resulted in normal boot times.
>>
>> PS. The version numbers are approximations, my recollection is not exact.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> vfio-users at redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>>
>
>
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