EFI Shell command -b option causes Firmware Crash

[patkim]

Hi,

I am using VMWare Player 14 on Windows 7 64 Host OS. I have a shell.efi application (64 bit) downloaded from this link​  

It's from Intel's Tianocore EDK II project. I have created a Windows 7 64 Guest OS in UEFI mode.

When I run Shell.efi & enter a shell command followed by -b option to pause at page, the VMware Firmware Crashes.

The issue does not exist with the VMware's own built-in shell.

A command like

Help

works fine but the moment I pass

Help -b

the firmware crashes at the first page break.

Basically any applicable shell command that supports -b option, when invoked with -b causes VMware to crash.

Does anyone have any idea what could the fix here?

There's no issue on a real UEFI Hardware. On my real hardware 'help -b' runs just fine as expected.

Thanks.

[wila]

Hi,

Probably best to ask dariusd​

He's the specialist on these kind of questions.

--

Wil

[dariusd]

Hi patkim,

Thanks for posting this.

I can't quite reproduce the same failure here... In my testing, the page-break function works fine, but the "new" Shell sometimes crashes on exit.  I haven't yet figured out if that's a bug in the new Shell or a bug in our firmware... We've put plenty of effort into testing the  builtin "old" Shell (built from the now-extinct GccShellPkg directory in EDK2), but not so much for the new Shell – which we don't yet include in our products – I'm afraid.

How are you launching the Shell?  e.g. Are you setting up a boot medium (CD/Floppy/HDD/other?) with the Shell.efi as \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI, or are you launching the "new" Shell.efi from within the builtin "old" shell?

Are you running any other commands before "help -b" triggers the crash?

Anything else you can think of which might be relevant to reproducing the problem?  It might be helpful if you could attach a vmware.log obtained from the VM bundle right after the failure occurs.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[smirnof]

Hi ​dariusd​

I confirm the original issue. I met it in Player 14 firstly, then upgaded Player to 15.5.2 build-15785246 but the issue retains.

I got efi file from tianocore

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/releases/tag/edk2-stable202002

and put UefiShell/X64/Shell.efi as bootx64.efi to EFI\boot folder of an USB flash drive.

I attached a piece of log.

[dariusd]

What actions do you take from when the Shell loads through until the time it crashes?  Which command(s) are you running?  It would be particularly helpful if you could give a set of commands or actions which always cause a crash for you.  If you could include a copy of the .vmx file for the VM as an attachment as well, that would be great.

Thanks,

--

Darius

[smirnof]

I am observing two cases now.

Case 1:

1. run VM

2. run help -b in the shell

3. vmware lets me see help screen and scroll it with Enter, the command successfully finishes

4. run help -b in the shell again

5. it crashes

Case 2:

1. run VM

2. run help -b in the shell

3. it crashes