OVMF Debug Log Driver Slated For Linux 6.17 To Help Analyze UEFI VM Boot Issues
([Virtualization] 23 July 08:40 AM EDT
OVMF Debug Log Driver)
- Reference: 0001563276
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/OVMF-Debug-Log-Driver
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For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed.
Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) since edk2-stable202508 supports writing their debug log to a memory buffer. Coming with Linux 6.17 in turn is the "ovmf-debug-log" driver that when enabled via the new OVMF_DEBUG_LOG Kconfig switch will allow exposing that debug log memory buffer to system administrators via the Linux sysfs interface.
With the ovmf-debug-log driver, the debug log is exposed to user-space at /sys/firmware/efi/ovmf_debug_log for being able to conveniently capture that Open Virtual Machine Firmware debug log.
This driver is a little more than one hundred lines of code and authored by Red Hat. The driver has been queued up within the [1]EFI.git codebase ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window when this new driver is expected to land.
[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/efi/efi.git/commit/?id=f393a761763c542761abcf978252d431269366d6
Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) since edk2-stable202508 supports writing their debug log to a memory buffer. Coming with Linux 6.17 in turn is the "ovmf-debug-log" driver that when enabled via the new OVMF_DEBUG_LOG Kconfig switch will allow exposing that debug log memory buffer to system administrators via the Linux sysfs interface.
With the ovmf-debug-log driver, the debug log is exposed to user-space at /sys/firmware/efi/ovmf_debug_log for being able to conveniently capture that Open Virtual Machine Firmware debug log.
This driver is a little more than one hundred lines of code and authored by Red Hat. The driver has been queued up within the [1]EFI.git codebase ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window when this new driver is expected to land.
[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/efi/efi.git/commit/?id=f393a761763c542761abcf978252d431269366d6
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