I got a GTX 970 card some days ago and decided to overhaul my setup. I don't want to rely on the VGA arbitration patch anymore but I also want to use windows 7. I know there are problems with win 7 but from my testing win 10 is not for me and I want to avoid it as long as possible.
I first attempted to forward the new gpu as usual and install win 7 but the installer would just hang at the boot splash. Turns out win 7 can do UEFI boot but it still tries to access VBE. I use OVMF pure, vfio-pci.disable_vga=1 and x-vga=off so that is not going to work. By replacing the real gpu with the virtual qxl I could finish the installation but nvidia's driver refused to install because it couldn't find the right hardware. By adding both my real gpu and qxl I could install the drivers. I don't know which card is considered the primary in that setup. On the next reboot I got the Tianocore boot splash on both screens, windows boot slash on the qxl window only and finally the desktop on my real gpu. According to the device manager the qxl device had failed with "Code 43". I never bothered to install the virtio drivers for qxl. The next logical step was to try to remove the qxl device but unfortunately windows bootloader will then fail: "Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data" I know I'm not the only one using win 7 with UEFI but I'm wondering if other people also have to keep a extra virtual gpu for things to work? As far as I can tell everything works as it should so unless there is some downside to the extra device I'll just keep it? _______________________________________________ vfio-users mailing list vfio-users@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/vfio-users
