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Does kvm friendly support GPT?

DISCUSSION Zhang Haoyu 3 participants 6 messages Dec 22, 2014 – Jan 3, 2015 KVM

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Zhang Haoyu

author
#0 lore raw

Hi,

When I perform P2V from native servers with win2008 to kvm vm, some cases failed due to the physical disk was using GPT for partition, and QEMU doesn't support GPT by default.

And, I see in below site that OVMF can be used to enable UEFI to support GPT,
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/OVMF

But, it seems that OVMF is not stable enough for kvm.

Any advises?

Thanks,
Zhang Haoyu

maintainer
#1 lore raw
Quoted 10 lines · Zhang Haoyu

Hi,

When I perform P2V from native servers with win2008 to kvm vm, some cases failed due to the physical disk was using GPT for partition, and QEMU doesn't support GPT by default.

And, I see in below site that OVMF can be used to enable UEFI to support GPT,
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/OVMF

But, it seems that OVMF is not stable enough for kvm.

OVMF is stable. The main issues are:

1) tools support (libvirt and above), which is being worked on

2) the FAT driver is not free, which prevents distribution in Fedora and several other distributions

Paolo

author
#2 lore raw
Quoted 12 lines · Paolo Bonzini
Quoted 9 lines · Zhang Haoyu

Hi,

When I perform P2V from native servers with win2008 to kvm vm, some cases failed due to the physical disk was using GPT for partition, and QEMU doesn't support GPT by default.

And, I see in below site that OVMF can be used to enable UEFI to support GPT,
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/OVMF

Quoted 9 lines
Quoted 1 line

But, it seems that OVMF is not stable enough for kvm.

OVMF is stable. The main issues are:

1) tools support (libvirt and above), which is being worked on

2) the FAT driver is not free, which prevents distribution in Fedora and several other distributions

Sorry, I cannot follow you,
the "FAT" mentioned above means FAT filesystem?
what's the relationship between OVMF and FAT?

I want to use OVMF to enable UEFI to support GPT partition for P2V scenario.

Thanks,
Zhang Haoyu

Quoted 2 lines

Paolo

maintainer
#3 lore raw
Quoted 8 lines · Zhang Haoyu
Quoted 3 lines

2) the FAT driver is not free, which prevents distribution in Fedora and several other distributions

Sorry, I cannot follow you,
the "FAT" mentioned above means FAT filesystem?
what's the relationship between OVMF and FAT?

I want to use OVMF to enable UEFI to support GPT partition for P2V scenario.

Yes, I mean FAT filesystem.

The EFI system partition (the one with BOOTX64.EFI) is FAT. The filesystem driver is not free, and without the driver you cannot boot a UEFI system. So Fedora and other distributions that do not allow non-free or patent-encumbered software cannot distribute a useful OVMF build.

Paolo

author
#4 lore raw
Quoted 12 lines · Paolo Bonzini
Quoted 8 lines · Zhang Haoyu
Quoted 3 lines

2) the FAT driver is not free, which prevents distribution in Fedora and several other distributions

Sorry, I cannot follow you,
the "FAT" mentioned above means FAT filesystem?
what's the relationship between OVMF and FAT?

I want to use OVMF to enable UEFI to support GPT partition for P2V scenario.

Quoted 8 lines

Yes, I mean FAT filesystem.

The EFI system partition (the one with BOOTX64.EFI) is FAT. The filesystem driver is not free, and without the driver you cannot boot a UEFI system. So Fedora and other distributions that do not allow non-free or patent-encumbered software cannot distribute a useful OVMF build.

Paolo,thanks.

Quoted 2 lines

Paolo

#5 lore raw
In reply to Zhang Haoyu
Quoted 10 lines · Zhang Haoyu

Hi,

When I perform P2V from native servers with win2008 to kvm vm, some cases failed due to the physical disk was using GPT for partition, and QEMU doesn't support GPT by default.

And, I see in below site that OVMF can be used to enable UEFI to support GPT,
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/OVMF

But, it seems that OVMF is not stable enough for kvm.

I guess you mean EFI rather than just GPT?

FWIW virt-p2v has some support for EFI, but it's very hairy and not that well tested. It tries to modify the guest to use BIOS for booting.

I'm waiting for good, free EFI support in qemu and then I can remove such hacks.

Rich.

Signature · 5 lines
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests.
http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v