windows 7 guest under bhyve (UEFI) doesn't start with FreeBSD 15

[Wojciech Puchar]

After update to latest 15 from 14.3 and updating edk2-bhyve-g202508_2 port
bhyve doesn't start windows 7

booting ends with message

BlInitializelibrary failed 0xc0000225

already found that's windows uefi loader message

Any ideas?

For now i'm going back to 14.3 VMs must work at the morning

[Wojciech Puchar]

> bhyve doesn't start windows 7
>
> booting ends with message
>
> BlInitializelibrary failed 0xc0000225
>
> already found that's windows uefi loader message
>
> Any ideas?
>
> For now i'm going back to 14.3 VMs must work at the morning
>

Hint - in FreeBSD 14.3 but with edk2-bhyve-g202508_2 port it too doesn't
work.

But in FreeBSD 15 with very old uefi-edk2-bhyve-20160704_1 package it
doesn't start at all, while works excellent in 14.3

[Ralf Mardorf]

A long time ago, I ran into the same problem with a Debian guest running
under QEMU/KVM on an Arch Linux host, since then, I’ve disabled the
"edk2-ovmf" package.

edk2-ovmf: Ignore package upgrade (202311-1 => 202605-1)

There's one way to work around the problem, which is what I did, and
there are two ways to fix it.

1. Reinstall the guest.

2. By editing a file or few files, you can use the old guest with the
new firmware. If I recall correctly, the steps to follow were described
somewhere in the https://bbs.archlinux.org/ forums. It’s probably
different on FreeBSD, but that should give you the keywords you need to
search for a solution that works on FreeBSD, even without the thread,
which I couldn't find. IIRC you need to search for edk2 m2 (milestone 2)
vs m4 (milestone 4) and how to make it backwards compatible.

IOW the guest isn’t the culprit. Some old EDK firmware versions have
been replaced by new firmware, which is why guests installed before the
update can no longer boot.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2026-07-09 at 23:59 +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> But in FreeBSD 15 with very old uefi-edk2-bhyve-20160704_1 package it
> doesn't start at all, while works excellent in 14.3

So the workaround doesn't work for you :(.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2026-07-10 at 09:38 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> IIRC you need to search for edk2 m2 (milestone 2)
> vs m4 (milestone 4) and how to make it backwards compatible.

If I use

bhyve edk2 m2 vs m4 and how to make it backwards compatible

to search with Google, the AI provides some related links to FreeBSD,
GitHub and Reddit. You might need to repeat the search if the AI
provides false search results related to M.2 NVMe drives.

[Wojciech Puchar]

> There's one way to work around the problem, which is what I did, and
> there are two ways to fix it.
>
> 1. Reinstall the guest.

No way. 20 VMs with heavily modified windows 7.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2026-07-10 at 10:20 +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > 1. Reinstall the guest.
>
> No way. 20 VMs with heavily modified windows 7.

That's really annoying. I hope someone can give you some helpful advice.

I actually have Winows XP (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows 10 (64
bit), and Windows 11 (64 bit) guest on VirtualBox on an Arch Linux host,
among others, and I’ve actually already given up on the Windows XP and 7
guests. Those don't boot or run anymore either, sorry, I hadn’t thought
of that. Aside from the fact that bhyve and QUEMU/KVM are in many ways
superior to VirtualBox, VirtualBox does have some nice advantages,
though in my case, they didn't help with Windows XP and 7 either.
Luckily, I don't rely on software that no longer runs on newer Windows
versions than XP and 7. It's annoying when you have to rely on that kind
of software. I also have no idea if there's any layer to get that kind
of software to run on Windows 11.

Sorry, I actually focused on edk2 and didn't take Windows 7 into
account.

[Mario Marietto]

---> That's really annoying. I hope someone can give you some helpful advice.

I'm curious to try virtualizing Windows 7 with my implementation of qemu
accelerated with bhyve. But why Windows 7 ? What's special about it ?

--

Mario.

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2026-07-10 at 12:12 +0200, Mario Marietto wrote:
> I'm curious to try virtualizing Windows 7 with my implementation of
> qemu accelerated with bhyve. But why Windows 7 ? What's special about
> it ?

I don't know why anything older than Windows 10 might be a problem,
since I've never looked into it in depth, for my purposes, the effort
just didn't seem worth it. Of course, it’s worth noting that Microsoft
no longer supports anything older than Windows 10 at all, support for
Windows 10 has been reduced to a minimum, and only Windows 11 is still
properly supported. In my opinion, virtualization should be able to turn
things around here, if not, well, then that’s not so great.

Apparently, however, there are users who can successfully run Windows 7
guests on FreeBSD and Linux. Unfortunately, I am not one of them.

[Mario Marietto]

---> I don't know why anything older than Windows 10 might be a problem

maybe because the 64-bit version of Windows 7 includes some limited UEFI support, and for this reason, it might not work on all hardware. 

--

Mario.

[Wojciech Puchar]

> I'm curious to try virtualizing Windows 7 with my implementation of qemu
> accelerated with bhyve. But why Windows 7 ? What's special about it ?

Can run with low memory footprint, and without any updates.

[Wojciech Puchar]

>> accelerated with bhyve. But why Windows 7 ? What's special about it ?
> Can run with low memory footprint, and without any updates.

does anyone have 202202_10 version of edk2-bhyve binary?
tried going backward with git on ports repository but it requires gcc11 to
build which itself doesn't build.

[Wojciech Puchar]

wasn't virtualisation made to run unmodified older software?
It's bad that bhyve changes that way.

[Wojciech Puchar]

thank you for help on priv.

On Fri, 10 Jul 2026, Mario Marietto wrote: