[pve-devel] Bug in Promox's OVMF implementation - resolution is garbled on MacOS, unless you reset machine on each boot?

[Victor Hooi]

Hi,

I can confirm that yes - I do have a efidisk set up. The MacOS on Proxmox
tutorial
<https://www.nicksherlock.com/2019/10/installing-macos-catalina-10-15-on-proxmox-6/>
which
I followed actually talks explicitly about setting up the efidisk.

The graphical glitch does appear to be some bug between OVMF and MacOS
specifically. I have asked upstream (link
<https://edk2.groups.io/g/discuss/message/165>) at the Tiancore project in
case they know anything.

Nicholas has patched the OVMF firmware - details
<https://www.nicksherlock.com/2018/04/patch-ovmf-to-support-macos-in-proxmox-5-1/>
-
but as far as I know, it's only to revert two small commits:

Proxmox 5 and 6’s version of the OVMF firmware includes two commits
> (2ac1730 and 147fd35) that are intended to mark the pagetables as read-only
> during startup. This was first seen in Proxmox 5.1. This conflicts with the
> OsxAptioFixDrv drivers in Clover, which expect to be able to modify the
> pagetables to remap memory:


Do you happen to know if there is a fix in Proxmox that could make this
work again, without needing to patch it?

Thanks,
Victor

On Wed, Jan 8, 2020 at 9:01 PM Dominik Csapak <d.csapak at proxmox.com> wrote:

> On 1/8/20 6:55 AM, Victor Hooi wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have been using Proxmox to run MacOS VMs, as per Nichola's guide here:
> >
> >
> https://www.nicksherlock.com/2019/10/installing-macos-catalina-10-15-on-proxmox-6/
> >
> > (and earlier versions).
> >
> > In one of the steps in the guide - you need to go into the OMVF BIOS
> > settings, and set the resolution:
> >
> > https://i.imgur.com/a5MeswK.png
> >
> > then reset the machine after:
> >
> > https://i.imgur.com/YiiiAQl.png
> >
> > If you do not do this - the display will be garbled:
> >
> > https://i.imgur.com/bs3zMkB.png
> >
> > However, this setting does not appear to be preserved. Every time you
> boot
> > up the VM, you need to go back into the menu, and hit Reset again.
>
> do you have an efidisk? if not, this setting cannot be saved...
> the following steps work here:
> * create vm with ovmf and efidisk
> * boot
> * change the ovmf resolution
> * continue to boot into os
> * poweroff
> * start vm again (has the correct selected resolution)
>
> >
> > I spoke to Nicholas, and he belieevs it to be a bug in OMVF, or rather in
> > Proxmox's implementation of OMVF:
>
> there is no "proxmox's implementation of ovmf"
> our package simply compiles the upstream version and changes the logo
>
> aside from that, the instruction mentions a patched version of
> ovmf, so you do not even use our package?
>
> also, using a recent ubuntu live cd (19.10) i cannot reproduce that
> since the live cd changes the resolution correctly and
> you can select many resolutions there (working)
>
> so i rather believe that this is a limitation/bug of macos's interaction
> with the graphics hardware/uefi (since afair, macs have their own
> efi implementation)
>
> kind regards
> dominik
>
>