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

[Victor Hooi]

Hi.

Also - I just saw this earlier thread in the mailing list:

https://pve.proxmox.com/pipermail/pve-devel/2020-February/041713.html

Could this be related to the issue of MacOS VMs not saving the UEFI
resolution? What version of qemu-server has this patch?

Thanks,
Victor

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 12:55 AM Victor Hooi <victorhooi at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>