libvirt VS EfiFs

Only in trivial cases. The problem is when another part of the program holds a function pointer (eg callback) into the library which has been unloaded.

libvirt has long been linked with -Wl,nodelete to avoid this:

https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/commit/8e44e5593eb9b89f...

So, next I setup cockpit and cockpit-machines, which works to create VMs (via cockpit-machines) but they use tcg/qemu i.e. emulation and no KVM based h/w acceleration - my test VMs were very slow! I figured out while qemu+KVM works on command line, it doesn't work and the culprit was libvirt! After discussing with the good folks on #asahi channel and with tobhe (Ubuntu-Asahi creator), I gathered enough evidence to conclude libvirtd doesn't know the "right" qemu commands to exec and logged my findings to the libvirt project https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues/365 (which can probably use some of the community noise, to expedite the fix).

Nvidia 510 introduced a regression you can see the relevant issues here and here

The work to split into multiple daemons started a few years ago.

https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/blob/9b8bb536ff999fa61e...

There have been a few complaints online in the Arch and Gitlab forums regarding this issue. https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues/410

The issue stems from a change in libvirt. Libvirt is responsible for parsing all your VM's XML and turning it into a QEMU command. Somewhere between libvirt version 6.6 and version 6.9, there was a slight change in the way USB devices are passed to QEMU, and obviously libvirt followed suit. As a result, some USB passthrough configurations, such as the MacOS one in the thread, as well as the onboard bluetooth for windows suffered errors.

It's a bug, fix is upstream: https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/commit/04736179b283f55f62616a20a1ec95c665aab8ca

See also UEFI drivers that can read a bunch of other file systems (btrfs, ext2/3/4, HFS, ISO, NTFS, UFS/FFS, XFS, ZFS, etc):

* https://efi.akeo.ie

* https://github.com/pbatard/efifs

The UEFI spec specifies (§13.3) that firmware is only required to read FAT32/16/12, which is generally why your /boot/efi is VFAT/FAT32.

In theory you would still need a FAT32 efi 'stub' partition with the exFAT filesystem drivers which you have to load before loading the WinPE loader (bootmgfw.efi).

I am pretty sure that that I am doing something incorrectly with the configuration files for the rEFInd bootloader, but everything else should be correct. However, as I write this, I barely realized did I not use the following commands recommended from the "Usage" section from the aforementioned website where I downloaded the zfs_x64.efi driver file for rEFInd:

I found the drivers here https://efi.akeo.ie/ . Which means, that any EFI bootloader able to load them will be able to use them. They are not for bootloader, but it is the firmware which will use them. As i said, i am little bit afraid that it will not work on any board as some manufacturers have pretty buggy firmware when talking about infrequently used features. Also i am bit unsure they will work with secure boot as they are gpl3 thus will be never signed by Microsoft and i don't know what UEFI requirements for drivers are in this regard.

Even for those using systemd-boot with custom efi drivers to provide functionality, it's worth noting that those drivers are being developed downstream of GRUB.

I think you can also add btrfs filesystem support for sd-boot by including the EFI drivers for it on the EFI partition instead, from https://github.com/pbatard/efifs/releases I think. Haven't tried it myself though.

EFI doesn't actually mandate FAT for the system partition. The system partition can be any filesystem that the firmware supports.

Of course, pretty much all EFI implementations only support FAT, so it's a bit of a moot point; the only one I'm aware of that supports anything else is the one on Intel Macs, which also understands HFS+.

You can find a huge selection of EFI filesystem drivers at https://efi.akeo.ie/ but they're derived from GRUB and hence GPL, so don't expect the likes of American Megatrends to be bundling these any time soon.