On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 04:11:05AM -0000, Mark Verlinde wrote:
A while ago (around the freeze of FC29) grub2-efi on top of Uboot
was
proposed as the (potentially) default setup for armhfp too.
Unfortunately (IMHO) it did not materialize and I'm searching for the
game-breaker.
Well. It's a mess with the huge stack of non-upstream grub2 patches
Fedora has.
My investigation so-far: * It works pretty good with a close to
upstream build grub, not with the default gub2 packages. Which makes
me believe loading an arm32 kernel as an Portable Executable instead
of grub's LoadImage() and StartImage() services may be a game-stopper.
NOTE : I understand this is necessary for chain loading efi stubs for
secure-boot. IMO this is not the pursued goal here.
Looked at this a while ago, for booting armhfp guests in kvm. IIRC the
state of affairs is: grub2 can boot armhfp kernels like aarch64
kernels, using the efi stub. upstream grub2 does this and it works
(2.03+ I think). Upstream kernel had bugs in efi stub boot path the
past but they are long fixed.
Dunno what Fedora grub2 is doing here. It loads the kernel successfully
but then the kernel hangs. It claims to be 2.04 so it should be new
enough for this to work. Just going compile vanilla upstream grub and
use that unfortunately doesn't work that easily any more due to
non-upstream BLS support fedora grub2 has. Also such a setup tends to
break on updates, when a new grub2.rpm lands.
I don't feel like wading through the fedora grub2 patches, trying to
find the broken one. systemd-boot isn't available for armhfp either.
So I gave up building on EFI (i.e. edk2 + grub2) for my VMs.
I'm using a patched[1] qemu uboot image as firmware now & attach the
fedora server image as sata disk. Done. Probably not the answer you
where looking for ...
take care,
Gerd
[1] 3-liner to turn off flash. qemu flash emulation seems to work only
with tcg but not with kvm ...