Subject: bug#35380: disk-image fails to install efi grub

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 May 2019 22:19:58 +0200

Hi rendaw,

rendaw <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On 4/25/19 5:44 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> Exactly: currently QEMU is run with a plain old BIOS, and not with the
>> UEFI firmware, so what you want is not implemented yet (see the comment
>> in gnu/system/vm.scm:799).
>>
>> I’m closing this bug, but you can open a wishlist item about it if you
>> want!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ludo’.
>
> I'm not going to comment on the wishlist thing, but this seems like a
> fairly huge problem:
>
> 1. The documentation doesn't mention this anywhere!  Not in the
> bootloader docs, not in the disk-image docs, not in the "limitations",
> not in "hardware considerations"
>
> 2. I've spent several _days_ now digging through Guix source code and
> never found that message. 

I’m sorry to hear that.  I guess that the reason the documentation
doesn’t mention it is that users didn’t find it all that important.
My guess is that to many of us, using a VM is a way to test an OS, and
it doesn’t matter in that context whether the emulated machine uses a PC
BIOS or UEFI.

I understand that it does matter in some cases, so I agree we should
support it.  I don’t know exactly what it would take, but if you have
ideas, they’d be welcome.

> 3. The build still completes with a successful exit code.  The only way
> to find out the image doesn't have a bootloader (-> is unusable) is to
> try to boot it

Yes, that’s an unfortunate bug reported here:
<https://issues.guix.info/issue/34276>.

Thanks,
Ludo’.