Hi. It seems that qemu also support UEFI now (via the OVMF firmware)...in addition to legacy BIOS. It would be nice if support for that was added to the GUI (and if necessary to libvirt)... so that one has a drop down box in virt-manager, where one can select which firmware (i.e. which BIOS implementation... like seabios, or UEFI) one want's to use for a given VM. Cheers, Chris.
Another firmware that you should support... is the grub-firmware-qemu,... which seems to allow to replace the normal BIOS firmware. A generic mean for distros to install symlinks in some place for supported firmware images, which are then auto-detected, would be nice.
Thanks for the report Christoph, but I don't think this is something we want to explicitly expose in virt-manager. I think long term plan for qemu is that they will by default use a UEFI build which has a CSM to provide legacy bios support. That way every VM can use UEFI or traditional bios as needed. When we get to that point, explicit UI will be mostly redundant, and I try not to expose things in virt-manager that only a small subset of people will want to tweak. But before we get to that point with qemu, there are distribution problems wrt ovmf that prevent any sort of cohesive solution, at least in the Fedora space, so even doing this correctly right now is problematic: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Testing_secureboot_with_KVM summary: eventually qemu is going to just do the right thing, and until that time there isn't much virt-manager can reliably do. closing as WONTFIX
Well I understand that there is some desire to keep the interface simple... but on the other hand... if you eventually want to compete against highly professional VM management interfaces (VMware, e.g.)... then you will have to map much more of the functionality that qemu offers into the GUI. Sure much of it is already in the XML and one can add it there (which I did with my UEFI now)... but this is surely not what people want on the end-user side... and definitely not doable when having a lot of VMs. And there might be absolutely valid circumstance where people want to choose different firmware for their VMs (even when there is a UEFI one with CSM)... for whatever reason... Some may do development for that and check different firmware on many test machines, etc. pp. libvirt is a nice tool,.. but right now it seems to be rather limited to be honest. Even many simple things like securely connecting VNC/SPICE via UNIX sockets doesn't work :(