UEFI instance snapshot error

[chunkyen]

Hi, when taking a snapshot of an UEFI VM, I get "Creating VM snapshot: xxx failed due to Create VM snapshot failed due to org.libvirt.LibvirtException: Operation not supported: internal snapshots of a VM with pflash based firmware are not supported"
Understand this is a limitation of libvirt that it cannot snapshot the pflash based firmware/NVRAM while the instance is running. I can only take snapshot if I power off the instance.
But I also read that recent version of libvirt does support live instance snapshot if it is using qcow2 format firmware. Is there something I can configure in CloudStack to change this so that live snapshot of UEFI instance work?
Thanks

[chunkyen]

Ok, answering my own question (partially), so if I leave "snapshot memory" off, I can take an instance snapshot while it is running. But still the question remains, if I have an UEFI instance in cloudstack, I cannot take a disk+memory snapshot of the instance?

[DaanHoogland]

I have never tried it (consciously). So I will have to test it, I have no idea really. I will try to find (someone to make) time to do it. By the looks of your error message it looks like a libvirt limitation, btw. so what version are you using?

[chunkyen]

I am using 4.22 KVM Ubuntu 24. Thanks

[DaanHoogland]

iirc that uses libvirt 10.0, right?

[slavkap]

Hi @chunkyen, @DaanHoogland, from what I found this is supported in libvirt 10.9 (for taking snapshots) and in 10.10 is included support for delete/revert
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1881850#c19
virt-manager/virt-manager#851 (comment)

[jgotteswinter]

I can test this with Libvirt 11, will report my results

[ingox]

@jgotteswinter Do you have any results yet to report?

[jgotteswinter]

I am working on adding a new hardware generation to our automation where i can test this. Its wip, but finished very soon

[ingox]

The problem still exists independent on the version of libvirt. I tried libvirt 11.10.0

The issue is the format of the nvram disk file. I converted it from raw to qcow2 and can now take snapshots with memory of VMs with UEFI.

Here are my changes in the XML config:
from:
<nvram template='/usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_VARS.secboot.fd' templateFormat='raw' format='**raw**'>/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/a5b15197-6388-4bc8-a4f4-c446d28fde7c.fd</nvram>
to:
<nvram template='/usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_VARS.secboot.fd' templateFormat='raw' format='**qcow2**'>/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nvram/a5b15197-6388-4bc8-a4f4-c446d28fde7c.**qcow2**.fd</nvram>

[DaanHoogland]

@ingox , does this mean it is to be fixed in an issue (in libvirt)?