HOW TO ENABLE BOOT IN BIOS LEGACY MODE ON SIMICS PUBLIC PREVIEW 6.0.43

Question

I'm trying to enable boot in bios legacy mode with no success.
Just as test case I'm using an old Ubuntu server image (bionic-server-cloudimg-i386.img).
This what I did:
Under %simics%/simics-qsp-cpu-6.0.1/targets/qsp-x86 I modified qsp-client-core.simics file as below:

# In order to run this, the QSP-x86 (2096), QSP-CPU (8112) and
# QSP-Clear-Linux (4094) packages should be installed.

decl {
! Script that runs the Quick Start Platform (QSP) with a client processor core.

 params from "%simics%/targets/qsp-x86/qsp-clear-linux.simics"
  default cpu_comp_class = "x86-coffee-lake"
  default num_cores = 4
  default enable_efi = FALSE
}
$disk0_image="/home/peppe/Scrivania/bionic.craff"
#$disk0_image="/opt/simics/simics-qsp-clear-linux-6.0.9/targets/qsp-x86/images/cl-b28910-v2.craff"
run-command-file "%simics%/targets/qsp-x86/qsp-clear-linux.simics"

When I run this file, the boot gets stuck with "Start PXE over IPv4" message (i.e. Simics doesn't find the UEFI partition and try to boot from network).
If I run the same file with cl-b28910-v2.craff image all works fine.
Note when it comes to bionic image I tried both with the raw format and with the craff format.
Also note the same bionic image boots as expected in QEMU.
My question: is the param enable_efi = FALSE enough to force Simics to boot in legacy mode?
If no what else do I have to do ?

Answer 1

The QSP really only supports booting from UEFI, and only a UEFI binary is shipping with the platform. All modern operating systems boot from UEFI anyway, so this should not be a big deal.

Answer 2

Indeed QSP model is not shipped with legacy BIOS image, but this does not prevent you from creating such and enable it on QSP model yourself. In particular, microvm or regular bios.bin (SeaBIOS?) from QEMU might work with some changes (removing QEMU specifics).