OVMF/UEFI Boot Entries

Introduction

If a VM boots via OVMF (UEFI), the firmware has to know which bootloader it has to start from the ESP. When no boot entries exist in the EFIVARS store, it tries to load the fallback $ESP/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi loader. Should that also fail, the VM gets booted into the EFI Shell

Add a Boot Option

Short How-To

1. Start-up the VM and press ESC to get into the OVMF menu.
2. Then "Boot Maintenance Manager" -> "Boot Options" -> "Add Boot Option" -> choose Disk with the Efi System Partition.
3. Now find the EFI executable, for example for Debian: EFI/debian/grubx64.efi or for Fedora: EFI/fedora/shimx64-fedora.efi.
4. Name it ("Input the description") and "Commit Change"
5. Use "Change Boot Order" to order the new entry to the top.

Detailed How-To

To add an entry of an existing bootloader go into the OVMF Menu by pressing 'ESC' during boot. Then select 'Boot Maintenance Manager':

Select 'Boot Options':

Select 'Add Boot Option':

Choose the Hard Drive with the ESP:

Navigate the folder structure to your bootloader (EFI/debian/shimx64.efi in this example)

→ →

After that, enter a name and commit:

→ →

To make it the default boot entry, you now have to change the boot order:

Press enter, select the boot entry with the arrow keys and move it up and down with '+' and '-' respectively. Then press enter again and commit your changes:

→

The last step is to reset the VM via OVMF, after that it should boot using the just configured boot entry.