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

[Blair Bethwaite]

Is there an upstream OVMF bug for the root cause or is it still unknown?

On 26 Jul. 2017 08:41, "John Koelndorfer" <jkoelndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> vfio-users mailing list
>>> vfio-users at redhat.com
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> vfio-users mailing list
> vfio-users at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/vfio-users/attachments/20170726/5fdfefdc/attachment.htm>