Re: [Xen-users] How to persist domU efi boot order ?

[James Dingwall <james-xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 08:03:37PM +0100, Håkon Alstadheim wrote:
> I've been playing around with ovmf, hoping to get better support for my 
> graphics card, but efforts are hampered by loooong wait while ovmf is 
> searching for floppies (I believe, at least there is a long wait). I 
> have managed to get into the boot menu in ovmf and remove the floppies 
> from the boot order. (Hit escape repeatedly at the domU console ) . A 
> file "NvVars" gets created in the top-level of the "esp" partition, but 
> still next time i boot the VM, the same wait occurs.
> 
> What am I doing wrong?
> 
> Either ovmf is not reading NvVars, or else NvVars gets created without 
> my settings. Maybe my "esp" partition is not found until _after_ ovmf 
> searches all drives, also non-existant ones?
> 
> I _have_ checked to see that the floppies are removed from the 
> boot-order before I continue the boot-process,
> 
> Googling around I found this <https://lists.gt.net/xen/users/420486>, in 
> which
> 
> "wei.liu2 at citrix" says:
>  > "As said in other email, we play a trick in our test system to
>  > make ovmf load grub automatically. "
> 
> Anybody have a clue what that trick is, and care to share?

IIRC Once you have have the NvVars created then you can make persistent 
modifications from an EFI shell.  You 
cannot make persistent modifications from the OS unless you write the NvVars 
file directly because OVMF cannot 
modify the NvVars files once the OS has started.  You can preconfigure the ESP 
with a bootx64.efi which is grub 
or any other EFI executable or create a startup.nsh which configures the 
persistent boot options.

e.g.

cat << EOF > startup.nsh
bcfg boot add 0 fs0:\EFI\example\my.efi "My EFI Executable"
rm fs0:\startup.nsh
reset
EOF

James

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