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rhboot / fwupdate

System firmware update support for UEFI machines
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Make fwupdate.efi able to set BootNext #118

Closed vathpela closed 4 years ago

vathpela commented 6 years ago

Dunno if it'll actually work, but spec-wise it looks like it's supposed to, and it'll help the beaker case.

superm1 commented 6 years ago

I guess I don't know the situation you're referring to when you say "beaker case", but why would BootNext ever need to be set in the EFI application? When you call UpdateCapsule FW will have taken over (potentially power cycling) and after FW update is done should just resume it's normal boot path to BootOrder

If this is for some custom type PXE solution, I think the easier approach it is to just set BootOrder to have whatever is supposed to come next after the FW update is done.

enunes commented 6 years ago

That would be for automated testing with Beaker.

Beaker (https://beaker-project.org/) requires machines to be set up with PXE always first, so that it can perform the OS installation before running jobs. Since installers are always changing BootOrder around, unfortunately in practice it is not possible to rely on it finding a disk/OS after that, often it ends up dropping to EFI shell, etc. Therefore Beaker relies on setting BootNext to make sure jobs in UEFI machines won't abort during reboots (https://beaker-project.org/docs/user-guide/task-environment.html#rhts-reboot).

fwupdate also relies on BootNext, and this is inconvenient in order to have automated fwupdate tasks. It requires the automated task to change BootOrder like you suggested, but that breaks the requirement above in case something goes wrong and leaves a broken automated machine.

@vathpela suggested that it might be possible for fwupdate to support a flag that will set a boot entry to BootNext after running the firmware update attempt, which would useful in this case.

superm1 commented 6 years ago

I guess I follow the logic you're mentioning here. It's basically you want to create a BootNextNext variable that fwupdate.efi will rename to BootNext when it's running.

I think it will still be awkward though because you are calling rhts-reboot as a last step right? And that will be what's setting BootNext to come to the OS again. So you probably need to have something changing both there and in fwupdate in concert to make this act like you want it to.

superm1 commented 4 years ago

https://github.com/rhboot/fwupdate/pull/136