Re: What to do about the qemu "-boot strict" option

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On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:37:02PM +0200, Laine Stump wrote:
> Awhile back a bug was filed against libvirt about the inability to completely
> exclude a disk from the boot order:
> 
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=888635
> 
> In short, you can't have a domain that used PXE to boot, but also has an
> un-bootable disk device *even if that disk isn't listed in the boot order*,
> because if PXE times out (e.g. due to the bridge forwarding delay), the BIOS
> will move on to the next target, which will be the unbootable disk device
> (again - even though it wasn't given a boot order), and get stuck at a "BOOT
> DISK FAILURE, PRESS ANY KEY" message until a user intervenes.

> It was obviously beyond the ability of libvirt to fix this (although it can be
> worked around by creating a very small disk image with a bootloader that merely
> instructs the system to reboot, and placing *that* disk in the boot order just
> after the PXE device), so the BZ was closed as CANTFIX.

We have a reboot-timeout boot parameter to reboot guest if not found
bootable device.

| commit ac05f3492421caeb05809ffa02c6198ede179e43
| Author: Amos Kong <akong@xxxxxxxxxx>
| Date:   Fri Sep 7 11:11:03 2012 +0800
| 
|     add a boot parameter to set reboot timeout
|     
|     Added an option to let qemu transfer a configuration file to bios,
|     "etc/boot-fail-wait", which could be specified by command
|         -boot reboot-timeout=T
|     T have a max value of 0xffff, unit is ms.
|     
|     With this option, guest will wait for a given time if not find
|     bootabled device, then reboot. If reboot-timeout is '-1', guest
|     will not reboot, qemu passes '-1' to bios by default.
|     
|     This feature need the new seabios's support.
|     
|     Seabios pulls the value from the fwcfg "file" interface, this
|     interface is used because SeaBIOS needs a reliable way of
|     obtaining a name, value size, and value. It in no way requires
|     that there be a real file on the user's host machine.
|     
|     Signed-off-by: Amos Kong <akong@xxxxxxxxxx>
|     Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>
| 
 
> A couple days ago I noticed that Amos Kong had later actually fixed this
> problem in seabios and qemu:
> 
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=888633
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=903204
> 
> Existing behavior is preserved though, and the new behavior only comes about if
> "-boot strict" is specified on the qemu commandline.
 
> It definitely seems desirable to have this ability in libvirt, but I'm almost
> of the opinion that this should *always* be the behavior (if you want all
> devices to be in the boot order, you can just give all of them (or none of
> them, if you're feeling adventurous) a boot order ranking).

We leave the default as off just for compatibility with old qemu.
For libvirt code, you can always use "strict=on"

> But I thought it
> would be prudent to ask opinions about that before making any patch.
> 
> So what are the opinions? Should the "if any devices are given a boot order,
> only attempt to boot from devices that have a boot order specified" behavior
> just be the default (and only) behavior when qemu/seabios supports it? (this
> would imply that the old behavior is just a bug)? Or do we need to make it
> configurable? If it needs to be configurable, the boot-related xml seems to be
> a bit unorganized (a flat list of elements with mostly a single attribute for
> each), but I suppose this could be added as a new attribute to the <bios>
> element...

-- 
			Amos.

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