How to default to UEFI

[mrguitar]

First, it's amazing to see how much this plugin has progressed! Congrats; it's awesome.

I'm pretty sure that both RHEL & Fedora have switched the default for VM creation from legacy BIOS to UEFI. I notice that when I use cockpit-machine to create a VM it's still defaulting to BIOS. 1) Can users change that? It's a drag to have to change this setting per instance I create. 2) I think it's time we start defaulting towards a bios-less world and default to UEFI. Thoughts?

Thanks!

[garrett]

Thanks for bringing this up! I agree; we should make UEFI the default.

Right now, you have to choose "create and edit" then click on BIOS to change it to UEFI before installing. This isn't ideal.

In our Matrix channel, @martinpitt, @jelly, and I discussed this a bit. libosinfo has <firmware arch="x86_64" type="efi"/> for OSes that could boot in EFI mode.

(If, for whatever reason, we can't parse that information from osinfo-query, then having a fallback of a cutoff date of 2010 should be "safe". We could even bump it up to 2015 to be absolutely sure.)

[jelly]

Ideally virt-install would default to UEFI so we don't have to change anything and the cockpit-machines and virt-install command line experience is the same. There is an issue for virt-install for this.

[mrguitar]

Great point with virt-install; I hope they change the default as well. In the meantime, it's not really as big of problem for virt-install users as they can just pass something like "--boot uefi" and get preciously what they need. There's no pain for virt-install users. I wish I could just set it once and get what I need for the VMs I create via cockpit-machines. I'm aware cockpit tries to avoid configuration (which is smart). ...but it would be great if there was a way to not manually reconfigure this on each VM. $0.02