FreeNAS 11 VMs

[SweetAndLow]

But using UEFI as the boot method when creating a Linux guest works as you would expect it to. It's a current limitation of bhyve which uses firmware based on the OVMF tianocore project, as does Virtualbox, to support UEFI booting guests which leads to the need to use the EFI shell in some cases. I don't imagine there will be any change to this when FreeNAS 11 is released.

CentOS is one of the few distros to already have the default EFI files and fallback that the byhve UEFI firmware expects to be present . For example in CentOS & minimal:

Code:

[root@localhost efi]# pwd
/boot/efi/efi
[root@localhost efi]# cd BOOT
[root@localhost BOOT]# ls -l
total 1340
-rwx------. 1 root root 1296176 Dec  7  2015 BOOTX64.EFI
-rwx------. 1 root root  73240 Dec  7  2015 fallback.efi

I usually use centos for my testing so this might be why it worked for me. I retesting things with ubuntu server and hit the boot problem and followed your 'how to' and got things working.

 

[wblock]

I have not seen the problem. FreeBSD installed and worked fine in a VM for me, with UEFI booting and VNC for a console. It might be the particular Linux distros chosen that have problems with UEFI.

 

[KrisBee]

I have not seen the problem. FreeBSD installed and worked fine in a VM for me, with UEFI booting and VNC for a console. It might be the particular Linux distros chosen that have problems with UEFI.

It's not encouraging for an Ixsystems rep to be unaware of how the bhyve UEFI firmware interacts with some major Linux distros.

 

[SweetAndLow]

It's not encouraging for an Ixsystems rep to be unaware of how the bhyve UEFI firmware interacts with some major Linux distros.

huh? It's clearly a ubuntu problem and wblock is just pointing that out. Centos and freebsd are working fine just ubuntu freaks out.

 

[KrisBee]

huh? It's clearly a ubuntu problem and wblock is just pointing that out. Centos and freebsd are working fine just ubuntu freaks out.

You don't count debian, alpine, arch, gentoo, fedora etc. ? These Linux distros do not have a problem with UEFI in general, only when used as VMs booting with the bhvye OMVF based UEFI firmware. You will see exactly the same behaviour in VirtualBox. These are all distros listed in the templates meant for Corral at https://download.freenas.org/vm-templates/

Saying: "I have not seen the problem. FreeBSD installed and worked fine in a VM for me ,.." doesn't really acknowledge the facts as they are and FreeNAS 11 users may be put off if the situation is not documented.

 

[wblock]

I'm sorry, I'm not clear on the complaint. I tested the new VM system lightly to write some preliminary documentation. If you're expecting me to be an expert on Linux UEFI booting, you'll disappointed. But as I said, I experienced no problems with FreeBSD UEFI booting, which leads me to think the problem is with whatever those particular Linux distros are doing. Which is what I said, I thought.

 

[KrisBee]

I'm sorry, I'm not clear on the complaint. I tested the new VM system lightly to write some preliminary documentation. If you're expecting me to be an expert on Linux UEFI booting, you'll disappointed. But as I said, I experienced no problems with FreeBSD UEFI booting, which leads me to think the problem is with whatever those particular Linux distros are doing. Which is what I said, I thought.

It's not a complaint. Believe it or not I'm trying to help by pointing out a situation which I thought you might want to know about. I've posted a fix to help others. It's not really a case of being an expert in Linux EFI booting, but rather knowing how the bhyve UEFI firmware may interact with various OS that users might want to use and any gotchas that exist, whether that's Linux, a flavour of BSD or Windows7/10, etc.

As it is. there seems to something not right with the bhyve implementation of UEFI EDK2 (Shell v2.1 UEFI v2.40) When it dumps you in a EFI shell the mapping table is not showing the various disk partitions, and the Boot Option Menu is pointing to the first entry which now reads EFI Misc Device and not EFI DVD/CDROM as you might expect. The later seems to have changed in the last FreeNAS 11 nightly.