How to see the activation status of VT-d and VT-x on Coreboot laptops?

General Discussion
1

Installation guide says that VT-d and VT-x have to be made sure to be activated in computer’s BIOS/UEFI.

However, my Coreboot’ed x220 has only “Press ESC for boot menu” during the booting process, and then a few seconds later it defaults to my current Xubuntu OS.

Where can I check to see if the VT-d and VT-x are activated in my Coreboot’ed machine?

2

Normally it will be on

When you boot into your current OS, as root run

dmesg | grep DMAR

look out for somehting like:

Enabled IRQ remapping

if you got that, VT-d is enabled.

Thats actually the SeaBIOS payload, not coreboot :wink:

1 Like
3

:joy: yeah, excuse my newbieness…

Thanks for the answer. I will try the dmesg command.

4

What about VT-x? Can I see explicitly if it is enabled, too?

5

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep vmx

6

What should I see at the output of that command? I am seeing a few dozen lines with cryptic abbreviations, and quite a few instances of vmx higlighted in red.

7

If you see vmx, its enabled.

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8

Got it. Thanks.

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9

I am getting none of these. But:

xl dmesg | grep VMX

says it is enabled
and qubes-hcl-report says HVM and I/O MMU are Active.

I do not see the options to enable or disable these in the dasharo BIOS settings. What should I do?

10

Since they are (apparently) enabled, what is it you want to do?

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
11

I was just confused by the output of dmesg and /proc/cpuinfo, which gave no output indicating that something is wrong. But now I see qubes-hcl-report is the relevant one. I might have a few more noob questions in the near future while trying to figure out how things (are supposed to) work. Thanks for your help and patience.