State "bios" firmware support for OSes

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 04:05:05PM +0200, Felipe Borges wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> We recently landed EFI support in GNOME Boxes where we create guests
> with "firmware = efi" by default when libosinfo reports that the OS
> supports it. This has worked great except for the regression with
> snapshots. Long story short, internal snapshots won't work with EFI,
> external snapshots won't allow our users to revert their domain to a
> certain snapshot.
> 
> For this reason, the Boxes designers and I concluded that the best
> approach for us here would be to only create EFI guests for OSes that
> REQUIRE it. If an OS can still boot with the legacy "bios" we should
> go for it, since it maintains our Snapshot management functionality.
> 
> The reason I am emailing libosinfo about this is to assess whether you
> folk would be open to having me adding <firmware arch="x86_64"
> type="bios"/> to the OSes that support it (some of them already state
> support for EFI).
> 
> Since the API returns a list of Osinfo.Firmware objects, we won't need
> any more work on libosinfo side in order to implement what we need in
> Boxes.
> 
> All in all, adding <firmware arch="x86_64" type="bios"/> to some OSes
> would be something you'd accept?

Yes, I was pretty much expecting we would need to add such info at some
point.

Might it be easier to ask which OS do NOT support BIOS ?

IOW, should we blindly add it to essentially every single OS, except for
the very few known to not support it any more.

Regards,
Daniel
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