Re: [Libguestfs] ovirt VM image to BM

On 05/18/22 15:30, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > But the keyboard doesn't work. This is also surprising because I > *thought* that both virt and baremetal basically use emulated or real > USB keyboard these days.

The keyboard does not work -- where? Once the OS is reached (gdm or console root prompt), or in grub (pre-boot, basically)?

The latter, I can explain. UEFI has a phase called "Boot Device Selection" (BDS) where the firmware decides exactly what devices to "connect" -- meaning what devices should be *bound* by UEFI drivers. There is a number of policies here; the gist is that the platform vendor can do whatever they want -- BDS is called "platform policy". Usually they support at least two configs, "full config" and "fast boot". Under "fast boot", the firmware only connects such devices to UEFI drivers that the firmware *knows* are needed for booting, and ignores everything else, including newly connected devices, potentially. Therefore, a USB keyboard could end up "non-driven" by UEFI because it is not needed for booting!

The fix is to get into the firmware setup UI by some other way [*], and either disable "fast boot", or -- if the firmware is flexible enough -- explicitly enable the binding of USB devices. [*] From "/etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware", the command grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg should create a grub2 menu entry, usually at the end of the boot menu, that invokes the "fwsetup" grub2 command. The trick is to make this entry the default entry, once the OS has fully booted (I guess via GRUB_DEFAULT in "/etc/default/grub"), and then reboot. When grub2 executes "fwsetup", it modifies a particular non-volatile UEFI global variable ("OsIndications"), and upon seeing that, the firmware at next boot will drop into the setup UI.