QEMU 8.1 available on pvetest and pve-no-subscription as of now

[t.lamprecht]

found the problem:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg971771.html

Qemu changed the default SMBIOS version to 3.0 with 64 Bit, which breaks all Juniper products as they set the system information in SMBIOS at boot.

Thanks for looking into this and sharing your findings here!

Could you maybe add a switch in the webinterface to change the SMBIOS to 32 bit?

This would be one option, but it still would not be fully ideal, as I also think that it would be a bit nicer if this could be improved in either SMBIOS settings (for better compat with 32 bit) or Juniper vSRX in setting up the entry point for 64 bit SMBIOS too, if the VM afterwards runs as 64 bit anyway. Because both SMBIOS entry points can coexist, so setting them both up would be the nicest thing to do from an OS POV to ensure any firmware upgrade doesn't break boot.

Oh and actually, you can work around this by pinning the machine-type to 8.0, which can be done through the web interface already, and we do pin it for more finicky and fragile OS like Windows already by default.
Would be great if you could test that, i.e., drop your args override and pin the machine to 8.0 instead and see if that also works.
If that works, and a fresh vSRX, directly installed under machine version 8.1, works too, I think we might avoid adding that extra flag.

 

[fiona]

Could you maybe add a switch in the webinterface to change the SMBIOS to 32 bit?

We'd like to avoid such switches for every edge case. Otherwise the complexity/overhead just grows and grows. There already is args just for this reason and pinning the machine type to 8.0 is the recommended workaround from our side.

If that works, and a fresh vSRX, directly installed under machine version 8.1, works too, I think we might avoid adding that extra flag.

I tested that pinning machine type to 8.0 does work. Unfortunately, there is no installer and the qcow2 test image doesn't work with newer machine types.

@blackzombie @giga1699
Since SMBIOS 3.0 is the new default in QEMU, maybe you can ask Juniper to provide updated qcow2 images that work with both 64 and 32 bit entry points? I just tested with FreeBSD 13.1, installed with machine type 8.0 (so the 32 bit entry is used) and then changed to machine type 8.1 (so the 64 bit entry is used) and it booted just fine, so it shouldn't be impossible to support.

 

[blackzombie]

Hi,

setting the machine type to 8.0 works perfectly fine, so that's okay for now.
I think juniper can update it, but when it will happen is something that no one knows

Thanks
Christian

 

[miniprox]

Thank you for this! I just tested on pve-qemu-kvm 8.1.2-4 with "args: -machine pc,smbios-entry-point-type=32" since I was using i440fx instead of q35, and I can confirm that the vSRX is now booting.

Thank you and Blackzombie too! - adding this to my BIG-IP machine config worked to fix the licensing issue I was encountering (the VE couldn't didn't the platform for the license to activate)