OVMF/UEFI Boot Entries

Introduction

If a VM boots via OVMF (UEFI^[1]), the firmware has to know which bootloader it has to start from the ESP^[2]. 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

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

→