[gentoo-user] QEMU -nographic Option with OVMF

[Oliver Dixon]

Hi,

I decided to bite the bullet yesterday and switch from clunky, and generally
untoward, VirtualBox to QEMU/KVM for developing kernel modules. I have a working
Gentoo VM with all the bells and whistles I need/want (UEFI booting, NIC
passthrough, SSH forwarding, NFSv4 support, etc.), but it's running in an SDL
window, which means the guest TTY will become confused and pretty much unusable
whenever I change the window size. (Which is rather often since I use a tiling
window manager.)

Since I'll only be using the TTY, the '-nographic' option to QEMU seems
appropriate, but this causes the initial bootloader screen (OVMF/EDK-II) and
GRUB to hang on stdout (screenshot attached). Here's my QEMU invocation script:

        #!/bin/bash

        exec qemu-system-x86_64 \
                -enable-kvm \
                -cpu host \
                -drive file=Gentoo-VM.img,if=virtio \
                -nic user,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:2222-:22 \
                -m 4G \
                -smp 12 \
                -name "Gentoo VM" \
                -bios /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd \
                -nographic \
                $@

I have to spawn another terminal to kill the QEMU process. I can make a bit of
progress by telling the kernel to direct early messages to ttyS0, which does
display the early bootup messages from Linux, but then hangs just before a login
prompt would be shown (screenshot attached).

        console=tty0 console=ttyS0,9600n8

Again, I can't do anything other than a `pkill qemu` from elsewhere.

Any ideas from someone more familiar with QEMU hosting Linux guests? I've only
been using it for a day, most of which has been trying to fix this annoying
behaviour.

Cheers.

-- 

Oliver Dixon
suugaku.co.uk

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