[ipxe-devel] ipxe boot a UEFI local ESP directly (using efi_local.c, file:// URI)?

[aaron.young at oracle.com]

Hello, I am investigating the possibility of extending iPXE to directly 
boot a local UEFI disk - i.e. boot an OS (i.e. grub.efi) on local EFI 
System Partition.

Our configuration is a QEMU VM booted in UEFI boot mode (i.e. using 
OVMF) which launches iPXE with an embedded script. The embedded iPXE 
script needs to be able to access/boot a local (virtio backed) ESP 
directly (in fallback cases).

In searching in the internet, the common advice is to simply do a 'exit 
1' command from iPXE to drop back into UEFI to resume its boot order 
processing to boot the local ESP, but this will not work for our 
application. We to be able to boot directly from iPXE and for iPXE to 
remain in control upon boot failure.

In searching the iPXE code, I see efi_local.c code which seems to 
attempt to address this situation using the file://<volume name>/<path> 
URI, such that the following iPXE command would do exactly what we need:

     > sanboot file://disk1/EFI/redhat/grubx64.efi

However, this encounters a number of problems currently and doesn't 
work, such as:

    1. It appears that OVMF is not, by default, connecting the HDs, thus 
the efi_local.c code finds no simple_file_system_protocol handles - thus 
finds no HDs.

    2. It appears that HDs passed from qemu to OVMF have no VolumeLabel 
assigned - thus efi_local.c: efi_local_check_volume_name() cannot match 
the <volume name> portion of the URI properly.

    3. the efi_block.c:efi_block_hook() code *appears* to assume booting 
over SNP - using last_opened_snpdev(). This seems to cause boot failure 
(even when the above two issues are circumvented).


My questions are:

    1. Is the efi_local.c code supposed to be fully functional in the 
configuration I describe above?

    2. If not, is there (planned) on-going work in this area (that I 
could possibly leverage/contribute to)?


Any other info/advice/suggestions/comments from anyone regarding this 
topic would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

    -Aaron Young