What does the vgabios rom do?

[stottle]

Your new instructions have

Edit XML for VM to supply GPU ROM manually

From another PC, navigate to this webpage: http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/

 

What does this do?  BTW, my card (EVGA GT 730) isn't listed. 

[jonp]

Your new instructions have

Edit XML for VM to supply GPU ROM manually

From another PC, navigate to this webpage: http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/

 

What does this do?  BTW, my card (EVGA GT 730) isn't listed. 

Its a really long explanation, but the short version is that some GPUs only load their ROM at initial boot of the physical hardware, so when a VM boots and also requests the ROM, there can be an error. This doesn't happen as much anymore, but with one of our test cards (an Asus AMD R9 290), we needed to do this to get it to work.

[jimbobulator]

Hey jonp, any advice on how to pick the right ROM for our GPU?  There are 4 different options for my card and I have no idea which is right.

 

Thanks!

[jonp]

From reading your other thread, I bet you won't even need to do this when we release rc4. That said, you can try any one or each of them. Loading the ROM file doesn't do anything to your gpu. It just manually supplies the virtual chipset with the ROM as opposed to reading it from the card.  If one doesn't work, try the next and cross your fingers!!

[jimbobulator]

Actually I've managed to get the gpu passed through without it now.  So much simpler than the xen days.

[jonp]

The bug you ran into from your other thread is something that tends to occur randomly only during the initial boot (freezes at virtual bios post), only when using SeaBIOS, and only on systems with a high cpu core count. That said, it's been solved completely for rc4. Was a bug in SeaBIOS. Also added in rc4 will be the ability to do a force shutdown on VMs in a paused state.