Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

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.

This bug was initially created as a copy of Bug #2002325

I am copying this bug because: 



Description of problem:

libguestfs currently uses SGA (an extension of seabios)
to enable serial output of BIOS messages at boot.  However
we want to deprecate this device in RHEL 9.  (Unfortunately
it has already been removed.)

There is a new alternative to this:

 -machine graphics=off

which makes seabios direct all messages to the serial port.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

libguestfs-1.45.6-12.el9.x86_64

How reproducible:

?

Steps to Reproduce:
1. export LIBGUESTFS_BACKEND=direct
2. libguestfs-test-tool

See if the BIOS messages appear in the output, eg:

  SGABIOS $Id$ (mockbuild@) Fri Apr 16 19:26:02 UTC 2021
  Term: 80x24
  4 0
  SeaBIOS (version 1.14.0-5.el9)
  Booting from ROM...

If they are not present then that's a problem.

> There is a new alternative to this:
> 
>  -machine graphics=off
> 
> which makes seabios direct all messages to the serial port.

FYI: seabios supports this for quite a while already.
latest RHEL-7 has it, all RHEL-8.x versions should have it too.
So you might consider switching over unconditionally.

It turns out that libvirt has no replacement for SGA
either, so while we would be able to remove this from
libguestfs in direct mode, we cannot remove it from
libguestfs in libvirt mode (and libvirt mode is the normal/
recommended way to use libguestfs).

So I don't think we can do this in time for RHEL 9 beta.

For direct backend:
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-September/msg00047.html

This isn't a complete fix until there's a way to enable this
via libvirt.

This requires a rather invasive change to libvirt.  So
we filed a bug to revert the change in qemu for RHEL 9 Beta.

For RHEL 9 we have fixed this.