Orange Pi 5 Plus fails to start OVMF EFI firmware under KVM

[rvandegrift]

I'm running armbian 23.08 bookworm on an orange pi 5 plus.  I'm trying to run VMs that boot with UEFI, but these are hanging.  I suspect a bug in the vendor kernel (5.10.160-rk35xx), since this works fine on an AWS bare metal arm64 host.

 

Example:

```

$ sudo apt install qemu-system qemu-efi-aarch64

...

$ cp /usr/share/AAVMF/AAVMF_VARS.fd ./aavmf_efivars.fd

$ qemu-system-aarch64 \

    -machine virt \

    -cpu max \
    -drive if=pflash,unit=0,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/AAVMF/AAVMF_CODE.fd \

    -drive file=aavmf_efivars.fd,format=raw,if=pflash

    -net none \

    -nographic \

    -enable-kvm

```

This hangs for me (to exit press C-a x).  If I remove `-enable-kvm`, the UEFI shell loads.

[Igor]

1 hour ago, rvandegrift said:

I suspect a bug in the vendor kernel

Yes. Vendor kernels are traditionally a pile of sh*, as cheap production as possible. We provide images with experimental kernels v6.5 to try out (at the end of download page). There it might work, but don't complain about several non/badly working things - its not production quality / stability. We are running several GitHub runners on two devices. With vendor kernel, this job was very fragile, while here, so far, it just work.

[rvandegrift]

> We provide images with experimental kernels v6.5 to try out (at the end of download page).

 

Oh awesome - I had to dig through the github artifacts to find the OrangePi 5 Plus trixie image.  I can confirm this fixes the issue: the UEFI firmware boots up as expected with kvm.

 

Thanks!