MAAS should install qemu-efi-aarch64 on arm64 KVM pods

[Lee Trager]

I used MAAS to deploy a VM host. When MAAS does this it installs the libvirt-daemon-system and libvirt-clients packages which pull in qemu-system-arm on ARM64. I tried to use MAAS to create a virtual machine but this failed with

Failed to open file '/usr/share/AAVMF/AAVMF_CODE.fd': No such file or directory

Manually installing the qemu-efi package fixes the issue.

AMD64 and PPC64 don't require the qemu-efi package because by default they don't emulate UEFI. Because ARM64 does emulate UEFI by default the qemu-efi package should be required by qemu-system-arm.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Hi Lee o/,
qemu-efi is only a transitional anymore.
It depends on and was replaced by qemu-efi-aarch64.

And qemu-system-arm already has a Recommends on ... qemu-efi-aarch64, qemu-efi-arm

Since the default is to install Recommends that should already be no issue.

There are use cases for qemu-system-arm without qemu-efi-aarch64 and we had bugs and discussions that imply making it a Depends causes problems for others.

Therefore I wonder what happened that this wasn't pulled in by default.

I've double checked Focal / Hirsute (what release are you on BTW?)

root@test-qemu-dep-h:~# apt install qemu-system-arm | grep -- qemu-efi

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

  publicsuffix qemu-block-extra qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm
  publicsuffix qemu-block-extra qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-system-arm
^C
root@test-qemu-dep-h:~# apt install libvirt-daemon-system | grep -- qemu-efi

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

  qemu-block-extra qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-system-arm
  parted policykit-1 publicsuffix qemu-block-extra qemu-efi-aarch64
  qemu-efi-arm qemu-system-arm qemu-system-common qemu-system-data
^C

root@test-qemu-dep-f:~# apt install qemu-system-arm | grep -- qemu-efi

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

  qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-system-common qemu-system-data
  qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-system-arm qemu-system-common
^C
root@test-qemu-dep-f:~# apt install libvirt-daemon-system | grep -- qemu-efi

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

  qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-kvm qemu-system-arm qemu-system-common
  qemu-efi-aarch64 qemu-efi-arm qemu-kvm qemu-system-arm qemu-system-common
^C

You see it is pulled in from libvirt-daemon-system as well as from qemu-system-arm?

So we can't make it stronger (depends) and I can not reproduce it over here.
Something is different on your test environment, do you know what?

[Diego Mascialino (dmascialino)]

Hi Christhian,

I am working with Lee in the maas team.

We are testing this in the last published image for bionic:
http://images.maas.io/ephemeral-v3/stable/bionic/arm64/20210216/ga-18.04/generic/

ubuntu@arm64:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic

ubuntu@arm64:~$ uname -a
Linux arm64 4.15.0-135-generic #139-Ubuntu SMP Mon Jan 18 17:40:29 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

ubuntu@arm64:~$ sudo apt install qemu-system-arm | grep -- qemu-efi

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

ubuntu@arm64:~$

Thanks,
Diego

[Lee Trager (ltrager)]

ah I see whats going on. MAAS passes a list of packages for cloud-init to install. cloud-init doesn't install recommends. I'll add it to the package list in MAAS.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

@Lee - ok that will be fixed in maas then - good to know.

@Diego - back then this was all rather new and many people "didn't want that EFI stuff installed as dependency :-)" Back then it was only a "suggests" via qemu-system-arm -suggest-> qemu-efi -depends-> qemu-efi-aarch64.

It also couldn't be anything else back then as qemu-efi-aarch64 is src:edk2 and that was only promotes in 2019 via bug 1570617. Back in bionic that wasn't in main yet.