How to enable Virtualbox EFI firmware on sculpt

[Johannes Schlatow]

Hi,

I'd would like to boot my native Linux installation from within Sculpt using Virtualbox. First, let me briefly describe what I have done so far:

I created a raw disk image that contains the relevant partitions (ESP, root and home), added the Block devices to the vfs of Virtualbox, and routed the Block sessions to the corresponding part_blk server. I also made the EFI firmware file available to Virtualbox. I created a vbox file and tested it on another Linux system. However, when using this vbox file on sculpt, I noticed that vbox does not respect the '<Firmware type="EFI"/>', i.e. neither my boot manager nor the UEFI shell appears. I had a look in the Genode repository and noticed that there is a vbox patch that removes (ifdef 0) the Nvram initialisation which is supposed to happen if the firmware type is EFI.

Thus it appears that EFI support has been 'patched-out' from the virtualbox port. Is this intentional? Are there any major blockers that prevent us from using Virtualbox with some EFI firmware?

Cheers
 Johannes