video/sound card installation in win7-Qubes any solution?

[tnt_b...@keemail.me]

i have installed windows 7 = working good

installed Qubes tool inside it = the window is minimized and maximized greatly.

but how about the video card ? i have nvidia and it is not installable because it can not identify the system (which is Qubes). so as the sound card.

rather than these two problems so far windows 7 working good , tho it has minor issues regarding opening&closing but these r not big for me to take care of at this moment.

but specially the video card how can we solve it ? (sure nvidia will not going to make new different fork of installation just for win7-Qubes. but i dunno how can we solve this issue in proper way). tho i would like to hear ur ideas/suggestions or solutions if any exist.

[Radoslaw Szkodzinski]

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:41 PM, <tnt_b...@keemail.me> wrote:
> i have installed windows 7 = working good
>
> installed Qubes tool inside it = the window is minimized and maximized
> greatly.
>
> but how about the video card ? i have nvidia and it is not installable
> because it can not identify the system (which is Qubes). so as the sound
> card.

nVidia is tricky, they have taken steps to prevent their consumer (not
Quadro, Grid or Tesla) GPUs from working inside virtual machines.
To prevent their checks from ruining your day (e.g. bluescreens or
device failing to start), you might have to hide Xen signature from
the OS.
The exact details are not known to me. Avoiding this might involve
setting the cpuid option in Xen VM configuration.
Oh, and very definitely nVidia cards cannot work in Xen as a secondary
GPU in SeaBIOS (non-UEFI) mode.
I have only successfully passed through older nVidia cards as primary
VGA (gfx_passthru=1 option) and AMD cards as secondary.

Sometimes, the UEFI boot works better, see:
http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/OVMF to attempt it.
(Sadly, many AMD cards lack UEFI firmware for reasons unknown. This is
probably not true in case of nVidia ones.)
I'm not sure how in new Qubes you can provide additional Xen options
to given virtual machine configuration file - this has been changed.

Additionally, the GPU reset might not work properly. To work around
this until the card gets proper reset support or workaround, you can
add startup/shutdown scripts in gpedit.msc using DevCon tool available
in Windows Development Kit to disable it on shutdown and enable on
boot.

--
Radosław Szkodziński

[Eric Shelton]

On Tuesday, March 1, 2016 at 6:22:30 AM UTC-5, Radosław Szkodziński wrote:

On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 8:41 PM,  <tnt_b...@keemail.me> wrote:
> i have installed windows 7 = working good
>
> installed Qubes tool inside it = the window is minimized and maximized
> greatly.
>
> but how about the video card ? i have nvidia and it is not installable
> because it can not identify the system (which is Qubes). so as the sound
> card.

nVidia is tricky, they have taken steps to prevent their consumer (not
Quadro, Grid or Tesla) GPUs from working inside virtual machines.
To prevent their checks from ruining your day (e.g. bluescreens or
device failing to start), you might have to hide Xen signature from
the OS.
The exact details are not known to me. Avoiding this might involve
setting the cpuid option in Xen VM configuration.

FWIW, that is not the main cause of the problem with running NVIDIA and AMD GPUs inside a virtual machine.  GPUs, mainly thanks to the push for DRM 10-15 years ago, are bizarre PCI devices that tend to not observe expected behavior for PCI devices, with weird things done with config and MMIO spaces.  The virtualized environment provided by Xen, which is perfectly reasonable for pretty much all other PCI devices, does not cope with this abuse in the same way as a native PCI bus, and the Windows drivers crash as a result.  The KVM folks have put a lot of effort into solving these problems, but it is still a game of cat & mouse.  If NVIDIA is determined to prevent their devices from being run within a VM, frankly there is no way to stop them from determining when they are running in a VM (there are more sophisticated and reliable techniques than just checking CPUID bits).

Eric

[tnt_b...@keemail.me]

so in conclusion , WIndows inside Qubes is just for small programs usage.

no games
no autocad
or anything using GPU

1. Mar 2016 14:29 by knock...@gmail.com:

[Eric Shelton]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 10:48 AM, <tnt_bom_bom> wrote:

so in conclusion , WIndows inside Qubes is just for small programs usage.

no games
no autocad
or anything using GPU

 

Depends on your definition of "small," I suppose.  I am able to run all of the things that I want to on Windows, so I haven't felt restricted too much.  Not sure about Autocad specifically, but I have run professional CAD software just fine in an HVM session.  Windows has a software 3D rendering pipeline (as do most OSes), and CAD generally does not demand the framerates required for games.  So, "anything using GPU" is definitely overstating things.

FWIW, the fundamental ability to do passthrough of a GPU exists in Xen and Qubes, but there is currently a bug preventing its use (https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/1659).  However, even after that is fixed, you will need a desktop system with a second GPU to be passed through to Windows, and don't expect it to be trivial to get everything working - I would strongly suggest using an adapter that someone has already demonstrated works under Xen.

The ability to do GPU virtualization/sharing of Intel GPUs is on the roadmap, which would address the matter even on notebook computers with a single GPU, but don't count on it being in place anytime soon.

Eric