enabling vt no longer chrases x on my hp elitebook 8530w

21 jul 2010

motivation

i always wanted to use VirtualBox with 64bit guests. but this did not work for a very long time. i guess this has something to do with that Quadro FX 770M card.

lspci
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G96M [Quadro FX 770M] (rev a1)

so on which architecture is my host OS?

arch
x86_64

what were the previous problems?

i’ve always experimented with the bios setting, on my hp bios this is called: “Virtualization Technology” and it can either be enabled or disabled. but for various versions of x11-drivers/nvidia it:

  • did not start X with an error message in /var/log/Xorg.0.log
  • crash the computer with a black screen (and more than average but constant fan noise)

however it was always able to use the xorg driver called ‘nv’ to use the system. only the proprietary nvidia module did not work as expected.

here is a list of driver versions i’ve experimented with (which did NOT work):

  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.27
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.29
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.44
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.51
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-180.60
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-185.18.36
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-185.18.36-r1
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-190.42-r3
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-190.53
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-190.53-r1
  • x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-195.36.24

what did fix it?

installing x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-256.35 finally fixed it!

what does work?

  • 3d game, so 3d acceleration support is there
  • 2d acceleration does seem to work as well
  • pm-suspend (hibernate-ram) seems to work as well
  • using VirtualBox with a 64 bit image (enabling System->Acceleration->Hardware Virtualization [x] Enable VT-X/AMD-V)
  • mode switch to consoles (alt+f1 to alt+f12) does work and i can see it actually (no black screen)

i hope this driver is somehow stable. currently it’s hardmasked in gentoo.

update: fr 23 jul

using x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-256.35 did break suspend’s resume with several crashes. i’ve disabled VT in the bios and now i’m using the latest stable release.

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