I received a couple of messages off list that suggested a few things and it
prompted me to try investigating further with just components found in NetBSD.
This test was run on a fairly recent NetBSD build of 9.99.70. I downloaded the
amd64 images for 9.99.71 (the ISO and IMG files), and tried booting them with
qemu using -nvmm and the OVMF binaries currently in pkgsrc with the following:
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4096 -machine q35 -accel=nvmm -boot menu=on \
-device qemu-xhci -device usb-tablet -device usb-mouse -smbios type=2 \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/pkg/share/OVMFX64.fd \
-device ich9-ahci,id=sata \
-device ide-cd,bus=sata.0,drive=disk \
-drive id=disk,if=none,media=cdrom,format=raw,file=NetBSD-9.99.71-amd64.iso
This produces an immediate “failed to start VCPU” and results in a core dump.
Also tried the NetNSD-9.99.71-amd64-install.img file with:
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4096 -machine q35 -accel=nvmm -boot menu=on \
-device qemu-xhci -device usb-tablet -device usb-mouse -smbios type=2 \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/pkg/share/OVMFX64.fd \
-device ich9-ahci,id=sata \
-device ide-hd,bus=sata.0,drive=disk \
-drive
id=disk,if=none,media=disk,format=raw,file=NetBSD-9.99.71-amd64-install.img
And it provides the same results - “failed to start VCPU” and a core dump.
Removing the “-accel=nvmm” from both of the scripts allows the boot to proceed,
but the OVMF code fails to find the CD or HD image and boot falls back to
attempting to boot over the network. This appears to be a bug in the version
of OVMF found in pkgsrc which is based on stable2018. Replacing the OVMF with
binaries obtained from a build of stable202005 fixes the disk access issue and
the boot then succeeds brining up the NetBSD installer.
I then proceeded to do two installations of NetBSD under qem; one using the
defaults for an MBR setup and one for a GPT setup. The resulting MBR disk
doesn’t boot under qemu; the GPT disk does boot however. In the case of the
MBR disk it appears the problem is that OVMF can’t find the disk or anything
bootable on it.
I’ve opened two PRs for these issues. PR-55582 for the NVMM issues and
PR-55582 for the OVMF issue.
