I've been hearing a lot about about how the new version of VMWare Fusion can run virtual operating systems in "headless mode".
A Google search makes it clear that other virtualisation products also have similar features, however, I have not been able to find a good description of what this actually means? What is happening when you do this?
Headless mode means that the virtual machine is running in the background without any foreground elements visible (like the Vmware Fusion application)
You would have no screen to see running the front end; i.e. the screen/console would not be visible, even though the operating system is running, and would typically have to access the machine via SSH.
For anyone that is interested, you can activate headless mode in VMWare Fusion by running the following command in Terminal.app
defaults write com.vmware.fusion fluxCapacitor -bool YES
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VT-x option is missing Surface Laptop 3 BIOS menu(Intel i7-1065G7 procesor), without this VT-x enabled, I cannot run any virtualization on Windows. Anyone encountered the same problem and know how to fix?
Bit late on the response so I dont know if you have worked this out already, but it might help someone else. I also have a Surface Laptop 3 but with an AMD CPU etc. Virtualisation was also missing on my BIOS. My issue was that when using Oracle VirtualBox, the 'Start' opting to begin installing Ubuntu was 'grayed out' or unable to be selected. After searching around, all I needed to proceed with installing Ubuntu was to do what this guide says.
Essentially I just searched in the Windows taskbar 'Turn Windows features on our off'. Here I was able to enable 'Virtual Machines Platform'. I also enabled Windows Hypervisor Platform although I am not sure if this is necessary. Restarted the system and I was able to proceed and install Ubuntu through VirtualBox! Hope this helps!
I found a little option using the Oracle Virtual Box for the Intel version of your Surface!
In the Task Manager, under Performance, you can check that virtualization is disabled. Just follow my easy steps:
Run VirtualBox as an administrator
Create new virtual machine (it doesn't matter what you choose)
Run it for the first time
Go to Machine Settings > System > Processor—as you can see, it is set to a default of 1
Change the number from one core to more than one and somewhere on the bottom side of the GUI you could see an attention icon that says something like
virtualization off. If you save these setting it will be automatically turned on
Just press OK and voila! It will be turned on!
Now when I type this response I checked too if it is enabled in Task Manager and it was, so yeah!
I want to try programming for EFI so I created a VM using virtualbox, checked "enable efi" option and left CD empty.
The efi shell boots how it should but instead of FS0 i only see BLK0, BLK1 etc. Is there any way to have FS without inserting USB disk (which is displayed as FS)?
Edit:
Thanks for your replies. For people who still want to use VB - formatting VB disk with DISKPART using Windows CD solves the problem.
#unixsmurf answer in comments is correct. Your image need file system supported by UEFI. If you can't see fsX in output of map command then it means that non of attached block devices (blkX) contain supported file system. Please create FAT32 partition on your disk, then you will be able to see fsX in map output. To switch between file systems use DOS like syntax command ie. fs0: switch to FS0 file system.
According to UEFI specification 2.5 section 12.3:
EFI encompasses the use of FAT32 for a system partition, and FAT12 or FAT16 for removable
media.
I would suggest to use OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware) directly with QEMU not through VirtualBox. Why ?
Because you can hack OVMF and learn how it works internally, this give you better understanding, VirtualBox hide internals and I'm not sure if it allow firmware replacement
OVMF was developed initially for QEMU and it is adapted by various other virtual machines, because of that there is much more support for OVMF on QEMU then OVMF on VirtualBox
using QEMU also give you ability to emulate your hardware and write drivers/applications in UEFI that use it
I wrote beginners tutorial that help setting up development environment needed for UEFI application development using OVMF.
More about OVMF.
If we assume we have only the binary, we can use windbg to drop into assembly and see what’s going on. Since windows guests run in fully emulated mode, it should be straightforward to trace in the guest.
If we want to trace what is happening in the virtualization layer, i.e. hypervisor, it will be a bit difficult. It depends on what kind of machine we are running on. These days all machines are 64 bit with VMX enabled which allow the hypervisor to intercept guest instructions on the fly, since processor virtualization is implemented in hardware.
Since it is just a trap by which the guest drops into hypervisor it is almost impossible to tell when the guest has entered the hypervisor and when its back. However we probably will not achieve much by tracing any code in the hypervisor.
In a VMX enabled machine only page table write changes and IOPL changes will go to hypervisor. Everything else is handled in the guest itself.
For all practical application debugging windbg should be fine.
Can we Trace the running Process(.exe) & its Instructions at guest OS using WinDbg??
Please help on this...
Im really appreciating your time on this ..
Thank you .. :)
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but if you're asking if you can run windbg on a virtualized machine, then yes, it works just like it does on a physical machine.
If you want to attach to the process that is running the virtual machine itself, but look at a process that is inside of the guest os, then the answer is no.
I want to create a C++ application that is to run on some Linux platform on a specific laptop computer. I do however not want the users of this laptop to use any other applications/system features than this program - much like the kiosk modes you would find on computers in a typical internet café.
One issue is that the laptop will be booted by the user, and such has to start my software automatically - leaving as little room as possible for the user to intervene with the process. It does not have to be completely secure, but it should be as close as possible.
What would be the best way to accomplish such a thing? Does there exist (free) Linux distributions specifically made for this (if not, I will probably use Arch Linux)? Are there any steps I could/should take in my program, or can I leave it all to the OS? Would creating my own little Linux distribution specifically for this be worth it?
This shouldn't be on stackoverflow but anyway:
Run a plain X session with no window manager, into this plain X session start your program in fullscreen. Done.
I run a small XUL application this way:
X :10 &
sleep 10
DISPLAY=:10 xulrunner ~/zkfoxtemp/application.ini
I would use a minimal live linux distribution - I prefer tinycorelinux but most will do.
using a minimal distribution ensures that the system doesn't have almost any features or programs you didn't plant there, and will make it easy to modify according to your needs
use a window manager as many programs don't behave properly if ran in plain X session (especially if they use pop up windows), but remove all it's menus and shortcuts
prefer booting from a read only media - this will minimize the chances of corruption (accidentally or intentionally)
remove unneeded services and features from the boot and login scripts
i wrote a cuda program and i am testing it on ubuntu as a virtual machine. the reason for this is i have windows 7, i don't want to install ubuntu as a secondary operating system, and i need to use a linux operating system for testing.
my question is: will the virtual machine limit the gpu resources? So will my cuda code be faster if i run it under my primary operating system than running it on a virtual machine?
I faced a similar task once. What I ended up doing was installing Ubuntu on a 8GB thumb drive with persistent mode enabled.
That gave me 4GB to install CUDA and everything else I needed.
Having a bootable USB stick around can be very useful. I recommend reading this.
Also, this link has some very interesting material if you're looking for other distros.
Unfortunately the virtual machine simulates a graphics device and as such you won't have access to the real GPU. This is because of the way the virtualisation handles multiple VMs accessing the same device - it provides a layer in between to share the real device.
It is possible to get true access to the hardware, but only if you have the right combination of software and hardware, see the SLI Multi-OS site for details.
So you're probably out of luck with the virtualisation route - if you really can't run your app in Windows then you're limited to the following:
Unrealistic: Install Linux instead
Unrealistic: Install Linux alongside (not an option)
Boot into a live CD, you could prepare a disk image with CUDA and mount the image each time
Setup (or beg/borrow) a separate box with Linux and access it remotely
I just heard a talk at NVIDIA's GPU technology conference by a researcher named Xiaohui Cui (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Among other things, he described accessing GPUs from Virtual machines using something called gVirtuS. He did not create gVirtuS, but described it as an opensource "virtual cuda" driver. See following link:
http://osl.uniparthenope.it/projects/gvirtus/
I have not tried gVirtuS, but sounds like it might do what you want.
As of CUDA 3.1 it's virtualization capabilities are not vivid, so the only usable approach is to run CUDA programs directly on the target HW+SW
Use rCUDA to add a virtual GPU to your VM.