HP Proliant DL145 G3 AMD-V Setting Missing?

[divi2323]

the coreboot link looks promising, but like the person above said, documentation is very lacking. it's quite the interesting concept though. My worry is that OS's like vmware esx/esxi and hyper-v hypervisor talk directly to the hardware and might miss coreboot entirely.

has anyone see any projects that are described in detail on using this to get around the fact that HP refuses to let processors with virtualization support run virtualization software?

[Samuel Verstraete]

I have 2 DL145G3's running with coreboot. Both of them are running a standard linux kernel with KVM. The kernel doesn't need to be aware of the coreboot...

All a bios needs to do is initialize some devices and make them available to the OS that will actually use them. And that is exactly what the coreboot firmware does.

I will not say that the coreboot solution is very customer friendly right now... but someone that is not a complete linux noob should get around with it.
And yes it's hackish and no you prolly shouldn't use it... but if you do... it will work ;)

@HP moderator can you please stop deleting stuff from this topic?

[Arthur E Knowles]

Seeing as how this issue is still a problem I've decided to post my solution. You can find it here ...

http://www.nt-guru.com/technotes/hp/

I have Hyper-V running just fine on Windows Server 2008, 2008 SP2, and 2008 R2 x64 releases. I have not tried Xenserver 5.x or VMware 4.x, but suspect they too will work just fine with it.

As a quick summary, all that is needed is to change the CMOS register at 02E5 from 0 to 1 to enable AMD-V support.

Hopes this helps to alleviate some of the frustration.

[divi2323]

Would you happen to know if the procedure for enabling this register would work in a DL145 G1 bios as well? I wouldnt think they would be too far apart from each other.

[Gregg Goldstein]

Does this work on the DL 145 G2, or DL380 G3 or G4?

Thanks,

Gregg

[Arthur E Knowles]

Most likely, but you cannot assume the registers to be close together. You would most likely need to start from scratch. The basic process I used is to use symcmos.exe to save the current CMOS to a text file. Import in to word. Convert text to table. Sort table by register value (i.e. 0000 on top). Change half the 0000 values to 0001. Convert table to text. Save as text. use symcmos to upload modified CMOS values. Run a AMD-V test (use Windows 7 with the hardware virtualization test tool from MS). If yes, keep spliting table. If no, use other half and split table. Again and again. Unlit you have identified the one register needed.

If you hit an error, which you will, that causes it to not boot, you need to sett he CMOS to defaults via the montherbaord jumper and split the results until you identify and remove that one value. Pain in the $$$. But once you identify the AMD-V register you never have to do it again. Just change it and move on.

Took me a day to do it for the Dl145.

[Arthur E Knowles]

Gregg,

The process probably works on any computer, but there are no guarentees.

The actual register specified for the Dl145 G3 probbaly doesn't work on any other model. Period. Plus it may be BIOS specific. The version I used is BIOS 009. Dated 7-19-2007