OVMF git 296153c5, included with Fedora 26

July 13, 2017 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Fedora 26 just released, and it ships with QEMU v2.9 and an updated OVMF, which adds SMM security improvements. Quoting email from Laszlo Ersek of Red Hat:

QEMU 2.9 is part of Fedora 26. The full changelog for QEMU 2.9 is here:

http://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/2.9

The broadcast SMI feature is just one tiny line in the huge list (and it only mentions the generic negotiation feature, not the specific broadcast one):

“The q35 machine type offers SMI feature negotiation to interested guest firmware.”

QEMU v2.9 is important for running the SMM driver stack of edk2 — more precisely, machine type “pc-q35-2.9” is important — because it offers negotiable SMI broadcast, i.e., where one VCPU writes to ioport 0xB2, and the SMI is raised synchronously on all VCPUs. See:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1412313 [ovmf]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1412327 [qemu]

QEMU v2.10 — more precisely, machine type “pc-q35-2.10” — will bring another SMM-related improvement, although not as critical as SMI broadcast. (And I guess it will be available in Fedora 27.) We call it “extended TSEG”, and it allows the QEMU user to specify more than 8MB SMRAM on the cmdline. This is important if you have a huge number of VCPUs, or huge guest RAM (into the TB range) because those things have a linearly growing SMRAM footprint (albeit with small constant factors). See:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1447027 [qemu and ovmf, both committed]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1469338 [libvirt, under design]

The patches (qemu and ovmf) committed for BZ#1447027 above solve the “many VCPUs” question. The “huge guest RAM” question needs more platform code in OVMF; the patch for that is on edk2-devel, pending review:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1468526 [ovmf, pending review]

More info:
https://getfedora.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode

Testing SMM with QEMU, KVM and libvirt

February 7, 2017 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Laszlo Ersek has created a new document that shows how to test SMM using UEFI’s OVMF. Great information!

I’ve added the following article to the TianoCore wiki[1]. It should help both Windows and Linux desktop users build a KVM test machine / environment that closely resembles mine. Such an environment is useful for testing and regression-testing new MP and SMM features and bugfixes. The initial setup is not short, but once you got it up and running, it’s very simple to rebuild OVMF with the edk2 changes, install the firmware binary in the right place (see the article) and then click the Play button on the Fedora 25 and Windows 10 guests, to see the changes in action. If you have smaller updates or structural reorgs for the document, there’s no need to ask me, just go ahead and do them. If some significant information is missing that you’d like me to add, I think I’d prefer new TianoCore BZs at this time (Product: Tianocore Feature Requests, Component: Web Content, Assignee: yours truly). I don’t know when I’ll have time again to dig into this.
[1]https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Testing-SMM-with-QEMU,-KVM-and-libvirt

Full announcement:
https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/edk2-devel

Laszlo’s OVMF SMM patch status

October 24, 2015October 31, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Laszlo Ersek of Red Hat has a huge patch to Tianocore, which adds SMM to OVMF, and just posted a detailed status update to the EDK2-devel mailing list, The current test results of patch look impressive! Pretend the following table is using a fixed font:

accel bits guest OS         OS boots efibootmgr works on S3 resume
—– —- ————— ——– ——————- ———
TCG    32    Fedlet 20141209 pass[1]   BSP and AP           pass
TCG    64    F21 XFCE LiveCD pass[1]   BSP and AP           fail[2]
KVM    32    Fedlet 20141209 pass      BSP and AP           pass
KVM    64    F21 XFCE LiveCD pass      BSP and AP           fail[2]
KVM    64    Windows 8.1      pass      n/a                  fail[2]

I’ve excerpted the key items from the TODO section of the status report: 🙂

* TODO:
– celebrate a bit this weekend (look at that “OS boots” column!)
– celebrate some more?

Full status report (including most of the details, and the omitted footnotes listed above):

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bios.edk2.devel/3357

(Also note that the EDK2-devel mailing list, which recently moved from SourceForge.net to Intel’s 01.org, is now hosted on Gmane under the gmane.bios.edk2 namespace. The previous SourceForge list is listed under the gmane.bios.tianocore namespace.)

ACPI testing with BITS Python

September 3, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Recently, Josh Triplett of Intel gave a talk on using BIOS Interface Test Suite (BITS) at LinuxCon North America.
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america/program/slides

Demystifying ACPI and EFI via Python and BITS

Click to access bits-with-demo.pdf

BTW, Josh also gave this talk at LinuxConNA’15 as well:

Everything’s a File Descriptor

Click to access fd_0.pdf

I think I’ve mentioned BITS in this blog before. But just in case I’ve not, BITS is a powerful, strange set of BIOS diagnostic tools. BITS started as a BIOS-centric tool, but now includes some UEFI support as well. BITS uses the GRUB boot manager as it’s UI, using GRUB menus for different features, see the screenshots page for a better understanding:
http://biosbits.org/screenshots/

BITS also includes a Python interpreter, so you can do interactive Python, or write scripts to test firmware. BITS has interfaces for BIOS, UEFI, and ACPI data.
http://biosbits.org/scripting/

Jake Edge wrote an excellent follow-up to Josh’s LinuxCON talk, with an article in LWN.net, discussing BITS’s Python for UEFI and ACPI investigations.

In a talk that could easily be seen as a follow-on to his PyCon 2015 talk, Josh Triplett presented at LinuxCon North America on using Python to explore the low-level firmware of today’s systems. The BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS) provides an environment that hearkens back to the days of BASIC, PEEK, and POKE, as he demonstrated at PyCon in Montréal in April, but it is much more than that. In Seattle at LinuxCon, he showed that it can also be used to look at and use the EFI and ACPI code in a system—all from Python.

The article is part of LWN.net subscriber-only content, and has been ‘leaked’ (see next URL below), and as the link on the page mentions, an occasional leak isn’t too bad, and helps with subscriptions. If you don’t have a LWN subscription, please think about it, they are probably the best news source for low-level Linux technologies. They have a 1-month free trial.

After reading this article, Laszlo Ersek of Red Hat started up a thread with Josh on the QEMU and UEFI dev mailing lists, with some new ways of thinking about using BITS Python for ACPI testing. Lots of good ideas on this thread, if you care about QEMU, ACPI, AML, or ACPICA tools please read the thread: sorry, I’m too lazy to summarize all of the ACPI nuances in the thread, it’s only a few messages.

Using Python to investigate EFI and ACPI
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.emulators.qemu, gmane.comp.bios.edk2.devel
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.qemu/358997

I hope some of the ACPI/AML testing ideas in this thread happen!

More Information:

https://github.com/biosbits/bits

SMM for OVMF

July 28, 2015 ~ hucktech ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this month, Laszlo Ersek of Redhat contributed a large patch to the TianoCore project, adding SMM support to OVMF.

“OVMF is capable of utilizing SMM if the underlying QEMU or KVM hypervisor emulates SMM. SMM is put to use in the S3 suspend and resume infrastructure, and in the UEFI variable driver stack. The purpose is (virtual) hardware separation between the runtime guest OS and the firmware (OVMF), with the intent to make Secure Boot actually secure, by preventing the runtime guest OS from tampering with the variable store and S3 areas.”

The changes require QEMU usage with these flags:

qemu-system-i386-machine q35,smm=on,accel=(tcg|kvm)-global driver=cfi.pflash01,property=secure,value=on -smp cpus=1 …

This new OVMF SMM works on the q35 machine, only in uniprocessor guests, and with TCG acceleration it only works on x86 not x64. Apparently the lack of 64-bit support is due to 64-bit code not available in TianoCore(?):

“In addition, using OvmfPkgIa32X64.dsc or OvmfPkgX64.dsc, the patch set even stops building after a point, *if* -D SMM_REQUIRE is passed. This is due to the unavailability of 64-bit open source components from Intel, and the build breakage is fully intentional — it shows that the -D SMM_REQUIRE feature is build-level incomplete for OvmfPkgIa32X64.dsc and OvmfPkgX64.dsc, and marks precisely where further development is needed.”

More Information:

Check out the 58-part patch on the mailing list, the first and last messages have a lot more documentation:

https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/edk2-devel