Bug 1997885

Summary:	RFE: virt-install: Prefer --boot UEFI for new fedora VMs
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9	Reporter:	Neal Gompa <ngompa13>
Component:	virt-manager	Assignee:	Virtualization Maintenance <virt-maint>
virt-manager sub component:	Common	QA Contact:	Jan Ščotka <jscotka>
Status:	CLOSED MIGRATED	Docs Contact:
Severity:	medium
Priority:	medium	CC:	bstinson, carl, crobinso, daltonminer, davide, dustymabe, fedora, hongzliu, jen, jsuchane, juzhou, jwboyer, k.koukiou, kkoukiou, mmarusak, mpitt, pjones, sricharan.ramanujam, tyan, tzheng, virt-maint
Version:	CentOS Stream	Keywords:	FutureFeature, MigratedToJIRA, Triaged
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:	1997884	Environment:
Last Closed:	2023-06-30 18:37:29 UTC	Type:	Feature Request
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:	1519002
Bug Blocks:

Description Neal Gompa 2021-08-26 01:29:29 UTC

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1997884 +++

Description of problem:
The Fedora Cloud WG recently changed to offering hybrid boot cloud images. This was done as the start of a longer-term effort to engage with the community and partners to boot Fedora images with UEFI. As part of this effort, we'd like to have the virt stack default to offering UEFI for VMs (with a CSM for BIOS backward compatibility if possible).

It would be appreciated if Cockpit defaulted to creating VMs with UEFI+CSM for "fedora", "unknown linux" and other similar things.

Additional info:
The full discussion about this is in the Fedora Cloud WG meeting logs here: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/teams/fedora_cloud_meeting/fedora_cloud_meeting.2021-08-19-14.59.log.html

Comment 2 Neal Gompa 2021-08-26 01:57:59 UTC

Here's the ticket for this in the Fedora Cloud WG tracker: https://pagure.io/cloud-sig/issue/345

Comment 3 Jaroslav Suchanek 2022-03-30 15:26:14 UTC

The reasonable defaults are usually got from the libosinfo and osinfo-db. For some OSs (win 11) it might be default. For others there could be reason, why uefi is not the default. I think it should be addressed in osinfo-db and not in virt-install part.

Cole, please correct me, if I am wrong. Thanks.

Comment 4 Cole Robinson 2022-04-19 16:25:15 UTC

The win11 piece needs pending osinfo-db work: https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/osinfo-db/-/merge_requests/362

Once that's in, virt-manager 4.0.0 will do the right thing and default to UEFI.

What this issue is asking is different though. When an OS supports both UEFI and BIOS, virt-install would still choose BIOS. If we wanted to change that, it's questionable whether it would be an osinfo-db or virt-install change or both.

But, like danpb says over here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1997882#c2

(In reply to Daniel Berrangé from comment #2)
> Note that using UEFI will break ability to use internal snapshots of VMs.
> This is the main reason why GNOME Boxes only uses UEFI in cases where the
> guest OS does not support legacy BIOS. We have done QEMU work needed to lift
> this limitation, but still need libvirt work done.

There's still blockers to fix before we can consider using UEFI by default in cases where it isn't a hard requirement.

So IMO nothing is going to change here in the short/medium term.