Test on Qemu with UEFI

The exemplary desktop recipe creates a Simple-CDD profile for an UEFI capable desktop system. While Simple-CDD offers a qemu option to test the installation of a CD or DVD created with Simple-CDD, it does not support UEFI. The following shows how to boot a Qemu with UEFI support in order to test the installation in EFI mode.

Prerequisites

The following setup is meant for Debian systems and was tested on Debian Bullseye.

Preparations

In order to be able to build an ISO image, first install the required packages for Simple-CDD:

sudo apt install simple-cdd xorriso

Then build an image from the desktop profile:

build-simple-cdd --profiles desktop

This should produce an ISO file in the folder images.

Please refer to the Simple-CDD website and the corresponding Debian Wiki Simple-CDD Howto page for more information.

Setup Qemu

To test the installation image Qemu can be used. Install the required packages using:

sudo apt install qemu-utils qemu-system-x86 ovmf qemu-system-gui

The package ovmf is required for UEFI support.

Now create some images for testing, e.g.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk.qcow2 10G
qemu-img create -f qcow2 second_disk.qcow2 10G

Create a bash script stored as image_run with the following contents (don't forget to make it executable using chmod +x image_run)

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
    cdrom="-boot c"
else
    cdrom="-boot d -drive media=cdrom,readonly=on,file=${1}"
fi
qemu-system-x86_64 \
    -m 2048 \
    -enable-kvm \
    -cpu host \
    ${cdrom} \
    -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd \
    -drive format=qcow2,file=disk.qcow2 \
    -drive format=qcow2,file=second_disk.qcow2

Testing using Qemu

Test the Simple-CDD installation by issuing (replace <simple-cdd-iso> with the iso file as created by Simple-CDD):

./image_run images/<simple-cdd-iso>

After the installation has been completed succesfully, test out the installed desktop system using

./image_run