KVM Broken By Lenovo
God damn it, I spent the last hour fixing the Debian packaging for KVM and building it for Edgy, and I'm rewarded with this:
[17179660.420000] kvm: disabled by bios
I had a look in the BIOS but couldn't see anything obious to enable this again.
Lenovo, you suck. And I was loving the X60 so much.
Posted by AdamW at Tue Dec 12 22:09:06 2006:
Just to rub it in - my Lenovo 3000 V100, which is basically the cheapass version of your X60, doesn't have it disabled in the BIOS...
(of course, it killed my system when I tried to run it, but I think that was probably because trying to allocate it 384MB of 'RAM' on a running desktop system which only has 512MB was a bad idea.)
Posted by Tomasz Torcz at Tue Dec 12 22:11:32 2006:
(of course, it killed my system when I tried to run it, but I think that was probably because trying to allocate it 384MB of 'RAM' on a running desktop system which only has 512MB was a bad idea.)
Welcome to the world of Chinese engineers :/
But there's a hope! I've complained to IBM/Lenovo, and got email from one of engineers, that they are planning to restore virtualization on my z61t.
Please, send them complaint email. More people wanting this feature may accelerate fixing it.
Posted by Ross at Tue Dec 12 22:17:39 2006:
Posted by Aigars Mahinovs at Wed Dec 13 06:54:43 2006:
But there's a hope! I've complained to IBM/Lenovo, and got email from one of engineers, that they are planning to restore virtualization on my z61t.
Please, send them complaint email. More people wanting this feature may accelerate fixing it.
I think my Dell had a strange switch in the bios that turned the virtualisation support on and off and it used one of the strange names for it (I think it was "VRT Technology" in my case).
You should also check that you actual CPU has the VT extensions.
It is also possible that there is some other "more advanced" BIOS mode where that setting does show up.
Posted by Baruch Even at Wed Dec 13 07:14:58 2006:
You should also check that you actual CPU has the VT extensions.
It is also possible that there is some other "more advanced" BIOS mode where that setting does show up.
What sort of changes did you need to do to the kvm packaging? If you have change that can benefit Debian please send them as patches in the Debian BTS for inclusion/consideration.
Posted by Christian Hergert at Wed Dec 13 09:22:18 2006:
In the bois, it should be something like "Enable VT" and its probably under the "Advanced chipset features" section or what-have-you.
Posted by Ross at Wed Dec 13 10:02:31 2006:
I'm in the process of submitting the changes to the BTS, the fundamental one is already there.
Yes, the CPU does support it:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr
I've updated to the latest BIOS and there is still nothing relevant that I can see in the BIOS.
Posted by Evgeni at Thu Dec 14 23:13:07 2006:
Yes, the CPU does support it:
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr
I've updated to the latest BIOS and there is still nothing relevant that I can see in the BIOS.
Same problem here with an Z61m, also sent a mail to Lenovo, but don't think this will help soon.
We need more complaints.
Regards
Evgeni
Posted by Raph at Fri Dec 22 13:21:32 2006:
Posted by Ross at Fri Dec 22 13:26:13 2006:
We need more complaints.
Regards
Evgeni
The general Contact Us form under technical support. If anyone has a decent direct email address, could I have it?
Posted by Raph at Fri Dec 22 14:04:01 2006:
I just had an answer : they're adding the functionnality but have no estimated time of completion...
Posted by Jelmer Vernooij at Mon Jan 15 14:40:32 2007:
I've just sent them a support request as well. The more people ask them about it, the sooner it gets in, hopefully :-)
Posted by laurent at Wed Jan 17 14:32:44 2007:
Well, VT was working on my X60 at the beginning,
'til I updated the bios.
I believe the working bios was 1.04.
Important note: after the bios upgrade,
completely switch off the computer, otherwise
the VT change is not active.
Happy virtualizing, kind regards,
Laurent
(BTW, this was under MS Windows, and I was
evaluating the Parallels Virtual Machine
which supports VT)
Posted by Pete at Thu Jan 25 18:46:17 2007:
'til I updated the bios.
I believe the working bios was 1.04.
Important note: after the bios upgrade,
completely switch off the computer, otherwise
the VT change is not active.
Happy virtualizing, kind regards,
Laurent
(BTW, this was under MS Windows, and I was
evaluating the Parallels Virtual Machine
which supports VT)
According to
<a href="http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-63144#APPLYCOUNTRY">http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-63144#APPLYCOUNTRY</a>
a bios update was made available around 23 Jan 2007 which enables setting this on in the bios CPU page.
Yay! :)
Posted by Ross at Thu Jan 25 19:15:09 2007:
<a href="http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-63144#APPLYCOUNTRY">http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-63144#APPLYCOUNTRY</a>
a bios update was made available around 23 Jan 2007 which enables setting this on in the bios CPU page.
Yay! :)
Yes, I blogged about it on that day:
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/lenovo-2007-01-23-17-10
http://www.burtonini.com/blog/computers/lenovo-2007-01-23-17-10
