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{Guide} Create a Gaming Virtual Machine - Page 49

post #481 of 617
1/18/13 at 2:31am
Asrock has confirmed that VT-D will no longer work in their bios 2.70 update for both Z77 Extreme4 and Z77 Extreme6.

So people looking for those two boards and maybe others need to be careful about the bios version shipped.
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post #482 of 617
1/18/13 at 7:09am
Quote:
Originally Posted by BulliteShot View Post

@powerhouse
I don't want a USB sound device. I can't find one that doesn't have reports of poor sound quality.
My GPU seems to support Audio over HDMI. I have been searching around for devices which extract the audio from a HDMI cable, but could only find devices in the region of €300+
I found this though, which I am going to try: eBay Item
It converts the HDMI to VGA while extracting the audio for only €15. My monitor supports both VGA and DVI and I personally don't see the difference between the two running at 1920x1080 resolution.

Yes, I found out that the usb-devices lists the PCI device ID of the USB hub through a quick google search. lsusb only seems to list the attached USB devices.

When I say windows stops working, I mean it just breaks. It's little things like a certain game won't start, and the only thing to fix it is a fresh install of windows. My most recent problem with windows was when triple clicking on a word in Chrome wouldn't select the entire paragraph. I could only fix it with a reinstall. (which was what made me switch to linux for my primary OS)

Yes, I agree with the USB audio sticks, though I must say mine isn't too bad. For me it's good enough for Windows use, since all my multimedia stuff resides on Linux anyway. (I'm actually one of these old fashioned guys who still listens to music from CD, playing in a real CD player.)

I do see a difference between DVI and VGA, but that's probably because I did this whole VGA passthru setup solely to be able to do photo editing, so I'm looking closely at the picture quality. VGA should be more than satisfactory for most uses.

The only question is whether this HDMI-VGA converter doesn't introduce noise or distortions. It seems worth trying, if it can help improve audio quality.
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post #483 of 617
1/18/13 at 7:19am
@nbhusain: Thanks for your detailed answers. This is most helpful. If I hadn't got already everything up and running, I would try your method.

Do you think DUET boot would work with a regular installation of Windows 7 on disk? I mean, can you dual boot your PC with Windows 7? I guess that would be asking too much.
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post #484 of 617
1/18/13 at 7:39am
@ powerhouse

Yea i dual boot my pc, linux and windows in UEFI mode, i have 2 disk each connected to a different sata controller, one of them contains my linux install, the other a regular UEFI install of windows 7, i use DUET on xen to boot the windows UEFI install directly from my secondary sata controller.

If you have a regular UEFI windows 7 installation on disk you can boot it with xen and duet. If your windows 7 install is MBR then no, but its possible to convert it to UEFI.
Edited by nbhusain - 1/18/13 at 8:41am
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post #485 of 617
1/18/13 at 8:19am
For newbies, here are a couple of ways to validate virtualization is truly enabled.

Linux = www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-xen-vmware-kvm-intel-vt-amd-v-support/

Windoze = http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=592
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post #486 of 617
1/18/13 at 8:57am
Quote:
Originally Posted by nyxcharon View Post

I did indeed install the driver while running Xen. Not sure how to go about troubleshooting this, since all I get is a black screen and I can't find anything in my logs. mad.gif

Unfortunately I can't try on my own system now, since I use my Nvidia card for domU exclusively. Here is what I found, in the hope it gives you some ideas:

An old post but a good description of the process, albeit for Gentoo: http://legroom.net/2008/06/22/running-binary-nvidia-drivers-under-xen-host
For CentOS: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/NvidiaWithXen
For OpenSuse: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2435805&postcount=114
And finally Ubuntu: http://nathanosullivan.com/blog/computing/using-ubuntu-904-as-a-xen-dom0-host-with-nvidia-driver/

This may be helpful too: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122900&highlight=xen&page=2

I would try the Ubuntu version, perhaps cross-check with the CentOS wiki. What bothers me is that all those how-tos are for rather old kernels. See here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=174219

So, the above solutions may work with pre-3.x kernels, but I haven't seen a single success report for newer kernels/hypervisors. See http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Kernel_Feature_Matrix for the difference between older and newer kernels/hypervisor.
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post #487 of 617
1/18/13 at 10:37am
Quote:
Originally Posted by nbhusain View Post

@ powerhouse

Yea i dual boot my pc, linux and windows in UEFI mode, i have 2 disk each connected to a different sata controller, one of them contains my linux install, the other a regular UEFI install of windows 7, i use DUET on xen to boot the windows UEFI install directly from my secondary sata controller.

If you have a regular UEFI windows 7 installation on disk you can boot it with xen and duet. If your windows 7 install is MBR then no, but its possible to convert it to UEFI.

That's great news! I believe that makes things a lot easier for many dual-boot users. A friend of mine recently got compatible hardware and I will ask him to let me give this a try.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chetyre View Post

Asrock has confirmed that VT-D will no longer work in their bios 2.70 update for both Z77 Extreme4 and Z77 Extreme6.

So people looking for those two boards and maybe others need to be careful about the bios version shipped.

Thanks for checking. I updated http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo.
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post #488 of 617
1/18/13 at 11:19am
@ powerhouse

Good luck, remember when installing windows, make sure the hard drive you're installing to is the only one connected, otherwise windows might create the efi partition it needs to boot on another disk or use a previous one it finds, this happened to me, windows found my linux efi partition and copied the boot files there. After that connect all your disks again.
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post #489 of 617
1/18/13 at 4:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chetyre View Post

Asrock has confirmed that VT-D will no longer work in their bios 2.70 update for both Z77 Extreme4 and Z77 Extreme6.

So people looking for those two boards and maybe others need to be careful about the bios version shipped.

I guess we can then safely say that this will also be the case for the Z77E-ITX with Bios updates 1.60 and 1.70......?

1.40 (currently) being the last known Bios version to support VT-d for the Z77E-ITX.

Hopefully Asrock will re-enable VT-d support for all their Z77 boards in future.

In the Z77 ITX form factor, it was one thing that gave them a big advantage over other OEM's.
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post #490 of 617
1/18/13 at 5:31pm
I'm going to give this another try and compile 4.2 from source with this patch http://www.davidgis.fr/download/xen-4.2_rev25240_gfx-passthrough-patchs.tar.bz2 but it needs my vga bios.

I'm stumped on how to extract that though. I see a lot of discussion lists mentioning nvtools, but I just can't find anything about what it is or how to use it. I found this site http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~lb/nvtools/ but it fails to compile.

Any help?
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