How to enable Virtualbox EFI firmware on sculpt

[Alexander Boettcher]

Hello,

On 06.02.19 14:00, Johannes Schlatow wrote:
> 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?

It is not clear, why this happened. Since nobody asked for this feature,
it just went unnoticed. Fell free to enable it and see where you get. At
least no blockers are known.

Cheers,

Alex.

-- 
Alexander Boettcher
Genode Labs

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