UEFI NVRAM seems to broken

[henrich]

It seems that VirtualBox's UEFI is broken. https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch03.html#efi says "VirtualBox includes experimental support for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)", still true?

Reproducible step are below.

Install guest Linux OS (e.g. CentOS7) and check UEFI variables.

BootCurrent: 0001 BootOrder: 0003,0000,0001,0002 Boot0000* EFI DVD/CDROM ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1,1)ATAPI(1,0,0) Boot0001* EFI Hard Drive ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(d,0)SATA(0,0,0) Boot0002* EFI Internal Shell MM(b,2fc4f000,2ffbefff)FvFile(7c04a583-9e3e-4f1c-ad65-e05268d0b4d1) Boot0003* CentOS Linux HD(1,800,64000,76b13713-188a-48c5-967c-79db0c17d3ef)File(\EFI\centos\shim.efi)

Somehow prefer Boot0001 to 0003. Anyway, then reboot guest OS.

BootCurrent: 0003 BootOrder: 0003,0000,0001,0002 Boot0000* EFI DVD/CDROM ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1,1)ATAPI(1,0,0) Boot0001* EFI Hard Drive ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(d,0)SATA(0,0,0) Boot0002* EFI Internal Shell MM(b,2fc4f000,2ffbefff)FvFile(7c04a583-9e3e-4f1c-ad65-e05268d0b4d1) Boot0003* CentOS Linux HD(1,800,64000,76b13713-188a-48c5-967c-79db0c17d3ef)File(\EFI\centos\shim.efi)

Okay 0003 is picked up. Remove /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT, reboot again, and it falls into UEFI shell.

BootCurrent: 0002 BootOrder: 0000,0001,0002 Boot0000* EFI DVD/CDROM ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(1,1)ATAPI(1,0,0) Boot0001* EFI Hard Drive ACPI(a0341d0,0)PCI(d,0)SATA(0,0,0) Boot0002* EFI Internal Shell MM(b,2fc4f000,2ffbefff)FvFile(7c04a583-9e3e-4f1c-ad65-e05268d0b4d1)

No entry for Boot0003 :-(

RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/openSUSE install EFI files to /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT (it violates UEFI spec), so it hides this problem. However, Debian/Ubuntu don't do so.

[Socratis]

Honestly, I do not understand why you consider this to be a bug, when it clearly states in the version that you're using that it is experimental. A bug is something that is advertised as working, yet it doesn't. Not in this case. It is advertised as "most probably it won't work".

[henrich]

I expect just documentation is not updated, so filed this as a issue.

[henrich]

Replying to socratis:

Honestly, I do not understand why you consider this to be a bug, when it clearly states in the version that you're using that it is experimental. A bug is something that is advertised as working, yet it doesn't. Not in this case. It is advertised as "most probably it won't work".

I found https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/14279 now, and re-condider https://www.virtualbox.org/changeset/43256/vbox changes would improve the issue.

[tru_tru]

Issue raised and pointing back to this entry from the CentOS forum and bugs.centos.org. ​https://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=14565

[Socratis]

Related discussion in the forums: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=87077

[aeichner]

NVRAM support was introduced with VirtualBox 6.1, so this should be fixed now, closing.