Subject: Re: bug#66207: Cannot boot VMs with grub-efi-bootloader

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:17:23 +0200

Hi,

Ricardo Wurmus <[email-masked]> skribis:

> The manual for “guix system” gives a somewhat complicated invocation
> that I only found out about later:
>
>           image=$(guix system image --image-type=qcow2 \
>                   gnu/system/examples/lightweight-desktop.tmpl)
>           cp $image /tmp/my-image.qcow2
>           chmod +w /tmp/my-image.qcow2
>           qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -hda /tmp/my-image.qcow2 -m 1000 \
>                              -bios $(guix build ovmf)/share/firmware/ovmf_x64.bin
>
> I haven’t tried it yet, but I assume that providing this extra “-bios”
> option would fix it.  It wasn’t necessary before, though, and I think
> it’s an inconvenient complication when running Guix VMs.

It means that ‘--image-type=qcow2’ can now end up creating EFI images.
Perhaps not so bad in practice since you can still create MBR images,
AIUI?

> Perhaps an example invocation of qemu-system-* could be added as a
> comment to the templates?

Yes, except maybe for those templates that are used as examples under
“Using the Configuration System”.

Ludo’.