Tag Archives: nvidia

CLI, OS, Virtualization

proxmox 6 NVIDIA GPU passthrough fix

4 Comments

I upgraded to ProxMox 6.0 and to my dismay my Windows VM suddenly began receiving the dreaded Code 43 error. After much digging I finally found this post on the ProxMox forums which outlines what needs to happen.

In my case, all I needed to do was tweak my machine type. There is no GUI option to do this, so it had to be done in the command line:

qm set <VM_ID> -machine pc-q35-3.1

That was all it took!

The forum also suggested a few other things if that didn’t work. I didn’t end up needing them but I’ll put them here in case it’s helpful:

Add args to your VM config file:

args: -cpu 'host,+kvm_pv_unhalt,+kvm_pv_eoi,hv_vendor_id=NV43FIX,kvm=off'

Add a few options to the CPU line:

cpu: host,hidden=1,flags=+pcid,hv-vendor-id=proxmox

With the above settings I also discovered there is no need to have x-vga=on anymore. This allows you to have both the regular VM console and your graphics card if you so desire.

Hardware, OS

Installing Linux Mint 18.3 with NVIDIA GTX 1070

Leave a comment

I became very frustrated when trying to install the latest Linux Mint on my desktop, which contains an NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics card. No matter what I tried I couldn’t even get the live CD environment to show up. It would stay at text, and even play the login sound, but no matter what I pressed I couldn’t get anything to come up on the display.

After much digging I came across an Ubuntu forum post which directed me to this manual describing different boot-time options. I had read somewhere that you want nomodeset to be enabled, but that didn’t cut it. Finally after reading the Ubuntu options I found the second half – vga=791

So, to install (and run for the first time before installing NVIDIA drivers) Linux Mint on a machine that has an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070, you have to edit the grub startup options (by pressing esc / tab) and append the following to the kernel line:

nomodeset vga=791

Also, if you manually partition the installation, make sure that the /boot partition is EXT2. I had first installed it as EXT4 but ran into strange problems.. restarting and making it EXT2 made those problems go away.

Gaming

Heroes of the Storm in Linux with Wine

Leave a comment

I’ve been wanting to get some of my games to play properly in Linux with Wine. Recently I’ve been able to get Heroes of the Storm working pretty well in Arch Linux. This is what I did to get it working with my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070.

Update 4/22/2017: Even more changes with wine 2.4-staging. This site is very helpful:

For Wine Staging release 2.3 and later

  • Change Windows Version to Windows XP
    • Open Wine configuration (winecfg) and change setting at the bottom
  • Install Visual C++ 2015 libraries (needed to update games)
    • winetricks vcrun2015
  • If you get errors about not being able to connect / login:
  • Install lib32-libldap and lib32-gnutls
Installer login Workaround:
 - Create a clean 32-bit wineprefix
 - Run the Battle.net installer with default options
  * It crashes at the very end when it tries to launch, but installation still finishes and succeeds.
 - Overwrite the default Battle.net config file:
  cd "$WINEPREFIX/users/$(whoami)/Application\ Data/Battle.net/"
  echo "{\"Client\": {\"HardwareAcceleration\": \"false\"}}" > "Battle.net.config"
 - Set the default mimicked windows version to Windows XP
 - Run Battle.net:
  wine "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program\ Files/Battle.net/Battle.net\ Launcher.exe"

Update 3/31/2017: A few things have changed since I wrote this article. I’ll keep the old information for historical purposes, but the process has updated

  1. Install mainstream nvidia drivers
    yaourt -Sy nvidia
  2. Install wine-staging
    pacman -Sy wine-staging
  3. Remove / move existing wine configuration if you have one
    rm -rf ~/.wine
  4. Create new 32bit wine prefix
    WINEARCH=win32 wine wineboot
  5. Enable CSMT by going to the Staging Tab and checking “Enable_CSMT for better graphic performance”
  6. Disable DirectX11 as described in step 3 below
  1. Install beta Nvidia drivers 
    1.  yaourt -Sy nvidia-beta
  2. Install wine 
    1. pacman -Sy wine
  3. Disable DirectX11 
    1. run winecfg
    2. switch to tab ‘Libraries’
    3. select ‘d3d11’ in the drop-down menu or type it in and click ‘Add’
    4. click ‘edit…’ and set it to disabled
    5. click ‘OK’
  4. Install msttcore fonts 
    1. winetricks corefonts
  5. Set Windows version to Windows XP 
    1. winetricks winxp
  6. (Dvorak keymap users only) Set keymap to US to allow for hotkeys to work 
    1. setxkbmap us

It’s not perfect. Battle.net splash screens don’t load (no news, patch info) and the first few moments in the game stutter (but it’s fine after that.) Without DX11 the game doesn’t quite look as shiny but is still quite playable. I hope future versions of WINE will help with this problem, but this is what I’m using for now.