[RFE] Enable badfish to work with UEFI mode

[redhat-performance]

[RFE] Enable badfish to work with UEFI mode

[kambiz-aghaiepour]

For completeness, we have been looking at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1873305#c11 so we downreved from 4.22.0.0 -> 4.20.20.20 -> 4.10.10.10. Somewhere in the process I noticed that 3 systems (of the 10 in the allocation) were set to UEFI mode. It's not clear if this was a random change that occurred during the iDRAC firmware downrev.

[sadsfae]

Update on this, a few systems theoretically support using Redfish to toggle BIOS mode according to docs (1020P/1029U SuperMicro and r640 / fc640 Dell).

We'll use this Github issue to track implementing a badfish option that lets folks change the BIOS mode between legacy, dual, and EFI against a set of hosts. This should keep people from needing to painstakingly go into the BIOS to set things and allows us a way to baseline systems back to our defaults when they go to other people who don't need to test EFI.

[smalleni]

Update on this, a few systems theoretically support using Redfish to toggle BIOS mode according to docs (1020P/1029U SuperMicro and r640 / fc640 Dell).

We'll use this Github issue to track implementing a badfish option that lets folks change the BIOS mode between legacy, dual, and EFI against a set of hosts. This should keep people from needing to painstakingly go into the BIOS to set things and allows us a way to baseline systems back to our defaults when they go to other people who don't need to test EFI.

It would also be good to have the ability to change the boot order in EFI mode as the interface names/mechanisms to change that seem to be different from BIOS.

[sadsfae]

Update on this, a few systems theoretically support using Redfish to toggle BIOS mode according to docs (1020P/1029U SuperMicro and r640 / fc640 Dell).
We'll use this Github issue to track implementing a badfish option that lets folks change the BIOS mode between legacy, dual, and EFI against a set of hosts. This should keep people from needing to painstakingly go into the BIOS to set things and allows us a way to baseline systems back to our defaults when they go to other people who don't need to test EFI.

It would also be good to have the ability to change the boot order in EFI mode as the interface names/mechanisms to change that seem to be different from BIOS.

Many things will be different. Also, standard Foreman kickstart will not work in EFI because it requires GPT / EFI partitions (which would require a total overhaul of our partition tables and templates).

I still see this being useful for toggling on/off via mass-orchestration - anything that saves peoples time really is useful here.

Boot order is an unknown thus far, but certainly will change as the BIOS "device names" will be abstracted via EFI - for now we will look into functionality for simple toggling and resetting of hosts so people have to do less things manually in niche areas where this is needed. We'd likely also need a check/reversion in QUADS via the badfish library bunded there to revert systems back to BIOS mode otherwise when assignments go out or come back in.

[smalleni]

Update on this, a few systems theoretically support using Redfish to toggle BIOS mode according to docs (1020P/1029U SuperMicro and r640 / fc640 Dell).
We'll use this Github issue to track implementing a badfish option that lets folks change the BIOS mode between legacy, dual, and EFI against a set of hosts. This should keep people from needing to painstakingly go into the BIOS to set things and allows us a way to baseline systems back to our defaults when they go to other people who don't need to test EFI.

It would also be good to have the ability to change the boot order in EFI mode as the interface names/mechanisms to change that seem to be different from BIOS.

Many things will be different. Also, standard Foreman kickstart will not work in EFI because it requires GPT / EFI partitions (which would require a total overhaul of our partition tables and templates).

I still see this being useful for toggling on/off via mass-orchestration - anything that saves peoples time really is useful here.

Boot order is an unknown thus far, but certainly will change as the BIOS "device names" will be abstracted via EFI - for now we will look into functionality for simple toggling and resetting of hosts so people have to do less things manually in niche areas where this is needed. We'd likely also need a check/reversion in QUADS via the badfish library bunded there to revert systems back to BIOS mode otherwise when assignments go out or come back in.

Understood. Are you saying the initial iteration will involve an option within badfish to just toggle between bios/uefi? This particular issue I opened is for an RFE to support boot order manipulation in UEFI mode, so I'd really appreciate it if you can add that also to your plans. Thanks!

[sadsfae]

Update on this, a few systems theoretically support using Redfish to toggle BIOS mode according to docs (1020P/1029U SuperMicro and r640 / fc640 Dell).
We'll use this Github issue to track implementing a badfish option that lets folks change the BIOS mode between legacy, dual, and EFI against a set of hosts. This should keep people from needing to painstakingly go into the BIOS to set things and allows us a way to baseline systems back to our defaults when they go to other people who don't need to test EFI.

It would also be good to have the ability to change the boot order in EFI mode as the interface names/mechanisms to change that seem to be different from BIOS.

Many things will be different. Also, standard Foreman kickstart will not work in EFI because it requires GPT / EFI partitions (which would require a total overhaul of our partition tables and templates).
I still see this being useful for toggling on/off via mass-orchestration - anything that saves peoples time really is useful here.
Boot order is an unknown thus far, but certainly will change as the BIOS "device names" will be abstracted via EFI - for now we will look into functionality for simple toggling and resetting of hosts so people have to do less things manually in niche areas where this is needed. We'd likely also need a check/reversion in QUADS via the badfish library bunded there to revert systems back to BIOS mode otherwise when assignments go out or come back in.

Understood. Are you saying the initial iteration will involve an option within badfish to just toggle between bios/uefi? This particular issue I opened is for an RFE to support boot order manipulation in UEFI mode, so I'd really appreciate it if you can add that also to your plans. Thanks!

Hey @smalleni - yeah, we first need to just see what the capabilities are here. Redfish features/implementation and abilities differ among vendors (and also models within those vendors). We need to first see about toggling this and saving people manual work where we can.

There is a setting in Redfish API called BootSourceOverrideMode(Legacy/UEFI) but we have not done any testing against this endpoint and functionality yet.

Boot order management would be a secondary, dependent undertaking, we first just need to see what the capabilities are to do any EFI modification/swapping - it's a setting deep in the BIOS and there likely will not be equal functionality available to us across our (currently three) major OEM bare-metal vendors. It's also possible on some OEM vendors this isn't possible at all, but hopefully it is. Before we can consider possibilities of boot order we first need to determine the fundamental level of Redfish API control over the baseline setting of toggling this.

For sure once we can programmatically swap this mode we'll dig into doing more with it - without the former though we won't be able to build on it further. Boot order modification would be the next obvious target, though would require some detection intelligence and additional idrac_interfaces.yml parsing (for Dell - SuperMicro and HPE don't really have that concept as they are only toggled by 'category' not individual device).