[Bug 284431] Bhyve Fails to Boot/Run Tails Linux

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=284431

Henrik Gulbrandsen <henrik@gulbra.net> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |henrik@gulbra.net

--- Comment #2 from Henrik Gulbrandsen <henrik@gulbra.net> ---
I am not sure about the image file you are booting from here, but I think I can
shed some light on the ISO trouble mentioned in the vm-bhyve bug report.

Major Linux distros have support for booting from either UEFI or legacy BIOS:

$ xorriso -indev debian-live-12.9.0-amd64-gnome.iso \
  -report_el_torito plain 2> /dev/null | grep "El Torito"
El Torito catalog  : 1700  1
El Torito cat path : /isolinux/boot.cat
El Torito images   :   N  Pltf  B   Emul  Ld_seg  Hdpt  Ldsiz         LBA
El Torito boot img :   1  BIOS  y   none  0x0000  0x00      4        4085
El Torito boot img :   2  UEFI  y   none  0x0000  0x00   9536        1701
El Torito img path :   1  /isolinux/isolinux.bin
El Torito img opts :   1  boot-info-table isohybrid-suitable
El Torito img path :   2  /boot/grub/efi.img

Tails, however, only includes the BIOS boot image:

$ xorriso -indev tails-amd64-6.11.iso \
  -report_el_torito plain 2> /dev/null | grep "El Torito"
El Torito catalog  : 101  1
El Torito cat path : /isolinux/boot.cat
El Torito images   :   N  Pltf  B   Emul  Ld_seg  Hdpt  Ldsiz         LBA
El Torito boot img :   1  BIOS  y   none  0x0000  0x00      4         102
El Torito img path :   1  /isolinux/isolinux.bin
El Torito img opts :   1  boot-info-table isohybrid-suitable

If I remember correctly, there is a fallback option for reading the UEFI boot
image from the filesystem, but that will not always be supported. Bhyve will
try to boot in BIOS mode. Unfortunately, the BIOS support in bhyve is very
limited (read: does not work), especially when it comes to emulated graphics
support.

This failure to boot a Tails ISO is actually why I wrote a Video BIOS for bhyve
back in 2019. Nobody volunteered to review and integrate those patches, and I
did not want to maintain them indefinitely in a separate repo, so I am afraid
that it could take a lot of work to fix them for FreeBSD 14.

Maybe this can be seen as a Tails bug, but bhyve has two different ways to boot
from an ISO file like this, and both of them apparently still fail.

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