[vfio-users] issues about windows GPU drivers update after passthrough

[trigger-happy]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 6:44 PM, fulaiyang <fulaiyang at 163.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>     Thank you for your advise. I use the seabios to boot the guest and what
> I do is GPU passthrough.
> It may be different from yours. Do you have any other ways?

Assuming that seabios, qemu and the linux kernel weren't updated between the
time your VM was working and the time it had problems, then the most likely
culprit is as you said, windows deciding to update the drivers.

What you can do is to remove the GPU passthrough for now and add a virtual
graphics device (I suggest QXL) by adding '-vga qxl' to the qemu command line
and removing the '-nographic' command line option.

>From there, try updating windows completely, reboot if necessary and then
shut down the VM once everything is done.

Afterwards, add the GPU passthrough again while retaining the '-vga qxl' option.
This should hopefully let windows display itself in the SDL window while showing
nothing through the GPU output.

If everything boots up fine, reinstall/update your GPU drivers. If
everything goes
well, you should see something on the display connected to your GPU. If nothing
happens or the system hangs, then we'll have to try some other method.


> At 2017-03-16 14:22:20, "trigger-happy" <triggerhappyelite at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Apologies to everyone if this ends up becoming a new thread. I've been
>>subscribed to this mailing list under the digest format and didn't
>>realize it would be so awkward to reply to an individual message.
>>
>>>Yesterday my windows 10 guest suddenly turned to black screen, and >after
>>> rebooting windows 10, GPU didn't work.
>>>I find that the GPU drivers has been updated to the newest version by
>>> >windows 10 automatically and it doesn't work.
>>>And windows 7 has the same thing. However if I install the windows 10
>>> >into the host machine derectly, the GPU driver
>>>can be updated to the newest version. If somebody encounter this >problem?
>>
>>Are you using UEFI (ovmf/edk2) for booting up your guest? Or is it
>>using the legacy MBR/BIOS method? If it's the former, you might want
>>to check what version of ovmf/edk2 you're using. I ran into this kind
>>of problem yesterday on my own setup after upgrading ovmf-git (I'm on
>>Arch linux).
>>
>>ovmf-git-21341.bd40dd27aa-1-x86_64 broke my setup and I had to do a
>>bit of hacking to build ovmf-git-18754.dc99315b87-1-x86_64 and get my
>>windows 10 guest to boot up again.
>>
>>James