RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.
Bug 1353689 - AAVMF: Drops to shell with uninitialized NVRAM file
Summary: AAVMF: Drops to shell with uninitialized NVRAM file
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Classification: Red Hat
Component: ovmf
Version: 7.3
Hardware: aarch64
OS: Linux
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: rc
: ---
Assignee: Laszlo Ersek
QA Contact: Chao Yang
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2016-07-07 17:45 UTC by Andrea Bolognani
Modified: 2017-10-10 10:56 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

Fixed In Version: ovmf-20160608-2.git988715a.el7
Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2017-10-10 10:56:57 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)
Working boot on RHEL 7.3 nightly (82.50 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:46 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
Failing boot on RHEL 7.3 nightly (81.51 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:46 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
Working boot on Fedora 24 (81.31 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:46 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
Failing boot on Fedora 24 (80.77 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:47 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
Working boot on Debian testing (82.63 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:47 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
Failing boot on Debian testing (81.51 KB, text/plain)
2016-07-07 17:48 UTC, Andrea Bolognani 		no flags Details
View All

Description Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:45:10 UTC 
This can be tested very easily by starting with a working
guest and replacing its NVRAM file with a copy of the NVRAM
template, like so:

  $ sudo cp -p \
    /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/guest_VARS.fd .

  $ cat /usr/share/AAVMF/AAVMF_VARS.fd | \
    sudo tee /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/guest_VARS.fd \
    >/dev/null

Starting the guest now will cause AAVMF to drop to a shell.

If the backup copy taken previously is restored, like so:

  $ sudo cat guest_VARS.fd | \
    sudo tee /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/guest_VARS.fd \
    >/dev/null

the guest will again boot normally.

Attached are logs for working and failing boots with Fedora
24, RHEL 7.3 nightly and Debian testing as guest OS.

Running on the host:

  kernel-4.5.0-0.44.el7.aarch64
  AAVMF-20160608-1.git988715a.el7.noarch
  qemu-kvm-rhev-2.6.0-11.el7.aarch64
Comment 1 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:46:01 UTC 
Created attachment 1177401 [details]
Working boot on RHEL 7.3 nightly
Comment 2 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:46:31 UTC 
Created attachment 1177402 [details]
Failing boot on RHEL 7.3 nightly
Comment 3 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:46:56 UTC 
Created attachment 1177403 [details]
Working boot on Fedora 24
Comment 4 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:47:19 UTC 
Created attachment 1177404 [details]
Failing boot on Fedora 24
Comment 5 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:47:42 UTC 
Created attachment 1177405 [details]
Working boot on Debian testing
Comment 6 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-07 17:48:03 UTC 
Created attachment 1177406 [details]
Failing boot on Debian testing
Comment 9 Richard W.M. Jones 2016-07-07 22:15:15 UTC 
For whatever reason the virt-builder Fedora 24 aarch64 image boots fine
from a "blank" varstore.

Laszlo asked me to post the libvirt XML which unfortunately I don't have
(transient guest - now deleted), but I have the next best thing which is
the qemu command line from the log file:

LC_ALL=C PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin QEMU_AUDIO_DRV=none /usr/bin/qemu-system-aarch64 -name tmp-f24,debug-threads=on -S -machine virt-2.6,accel=kvm,usb=off -cpu host -drive file=/usr/share/edk2/aarch64/QEMU_EFI-pflash.raw,if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,readonly=on -drive file=/var/tmp/tmp-f24.qcow2.nvram,if=pflash,format=raw,unit=1 -m 4096 -realtime mlock=off -smp 4,sockets=4,cores=1,threads=1 -uuid 80568c6b-441c-4b58-8593-8499df33fabf -nographic -no-user-config -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/domain-3-tmp-f24/monitor.sock,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc,driftfix=slew -no-shutdown -boot strict=on -device i82801b11-bridge,id=pci.1,bus=pcie.0,addr=0x1 -device pci-bridge,chassis_nr=2,id=pci.2,bus=pci.1,addr=0x1 -device virtio-scsi-device,id=scsi0 -usb -drive file=/var/tmp/tmp-f24.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=none,id=drive-scsi0-0-0-0,cache=none,aio=native -device scsi-hd,bus=scsi0.0,channel=0,scsi-id=0,lun=0,drive=drive-scsi0-0-0-0,id=scsi0-0-0-0,bootindex=1 -netdev tap,fd=25,id=hostnet0,vhost=on,vhostfd=27 -device virtio-net-device,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:b9:42:fd -serial pty -msg timestamp=on

The /var/tmp/tmp-f24.qcow2.nvram file mentioned there is a copy of
/usr/share/edk2/aarch64/vars-template-pflash.raw, from
edk2-aarch64-20160418gita8c39ba-1.fc24.noarch .
Comment 10 Laszlo Ersek 2016-07-08 10:13:46 UTC 
The problem is that ArmVirtPkg at the moment lacks the equivalent of OvmfPkg commit 14b2ebc30c8b.

And, Rich is not experiencing the bug because his command line specifies a scsi-hd device on a virtio-scsi-device HBA, while Andrea used a virtio-blk-device disk. QemuBootOrderLib in edk2 (used by both OVMF and AAVMF) works a bit differently with the OpenFirmware device paths that correspond to one vs. the other of these two device types. In Rich's case, the issue was masked.
Comment 11 Laszlo Ersek 2016-07-08 10:32:40 UTC 
Posted upstream patch:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.edk2.devel/14298
Comment 12 Laszlo Ersek 2016-07-08 11:19:10 UTC 
Upstream commit efadd41590b4.
Comment 14 Andrea Bolognani 2016-07-08 13:14:36 UTC 
I tried the scratch build you provided, and it works as
advertised: both Fedora 24 and RHEL 7.3 recover from having
the NVRAM overwritten by the template, and from the AAVMF
log I can clearly see it's fallback.efi's doing.

Debian, on the other hand, not having any fallback.efi or
even BOOTAA64.EFI, still drops to the AAVMF shell.

The only thing that I should note is that, when it drops to
shell, it takes way longer than before to do so, and in
fact I thought it was stuck completely at first. But it got
there eventually, after what felt like 30 seconds or so.
Comment 16 Laszlo Ersek 2016-07-08 14:05:37 UTC 
(In reply to Andrea Bolognani from comment #14)
> I tried the scratch build you provided, and it works as
> advertised: both Fedora 24 and RHEL 7.3 recover from having
> the NVRAM overwritten by the template, and from the AAVMF
> log I can clearly see it's fallback.efi's doing.

Thanks for the test! I'll post the backport soon.
Comment 23 Miroslav Rezanina 2016-07-12 07:16:01 UTC 
Fix included in ovmf-20160608-2.git988715a.el7
Comment 26 Laszlo Ersek 2017-10-10 10:56:57 UTC 
Fixed in RHEL-ALT-7.3.
Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.