I know this may not be the best place to ask for this, but I don’t really know where the appropriate place to ask would be and I can’t seem to be able to find the answer on my own.
Coming from VMWare Workstation Pro to KVM/QEMU + Virtual Machine Manager I am stuck finding a feature similar to the “Power on to Firmware” feature found in VMWare Workstation Pro under: VM > Power > Power on to Firmware.
I have a feeling that this is going to have a very obvious answer, but sadly I cannot seem to find it no matter where I look, or what I google.
Currently I can only get into the UEFI firmware of my Win10 VM by going to: Change Advanced Startup Options > Advanced Startup > Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > UEFI Firmware Settings > Restart. The problem is that I have numerous different VMs with different Operating Systems which I would love to be able to go into their Firmware settings but don’t know how it’s done.
To summarize, I would like to be able to boot into the VM Firmware upon boot, either with the keyboard combination or a feature someplace on the VMM.
When I open the VM from the virt-manager screen, but do not start it, I can click the second icon on the menu bar. Here, it looks like “i” (for information). That gives me a settings screen. There, I go to “Boot Options” and I turn on “Enable Boot Menu”.
Then back to the main screen (left icon in menu bar).
Now, whenever I start the VM, I can hit ESC to get into the boot menu and other firmware settings. It takes a bit of exploring to know where to find what.
Booting the VM is a bit slower with the boot menu on, but I leave it on because it is useful often enough.