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HP Disables VT On Some Intel Laptops
snoukka writes "I just bought a new HP nx9420 laptop in order to use it with Linux, XEN, and windows on XEN. I was very disappointed when I noticed that the processor had this feature but VT is disabled in BIOS by HP and cannot be enabled! Disabled!? It's like buying a car with turbo and finding out after buying it that this turbo 'feature' was disabled." The forum thread goes back to last August and is still live. The latest post from an HP rep indicates that new firmware for the nx9420 should be available later this week in which the ability to switch on VT is enabled. It's not clear whether other HP products, in which VT was also disabled, will also get new firmware.
But will HP have to charge $4.99 for the VT compatible firmware in order to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?
...just in time for you to play Duke Nukem Forever!
blah blah blah
What is VT? That'd be nice to know.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I gave VT to my wife... ;)
...on some of their newer Thinkpads. You'd think that when you're spending $2000 on a "business-class" laptop, you'd get it without any artificial limitations...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Enabling VT is a huge security risk with no benefit for most of HP's customers. You probably should be able to turn it on, but having it on leaves open the possibility that a rootkit could be installed as the hypervisor/VMM/whatever, making it undetectable to the OS. Even having the option seems dangerous, as many "power users" will probably enable everything in the BIOS they can, regardless of risk/reward. On second thought, there are probably only a few hundred people that would run Xen on their laptop, so why have the "bug" available on the other few hundred thousand laptops? I suspect there may be many legal reasons why it is disabled by default, whether or not disabling the option to turn it on was intentional or not.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
I tried to compare the perf difference with VT enabled & disabled using Virtual PC 2007 RC2 & Vmware Latest Beta.
I was pretty disappointed to find that there is no perf. difference with VT enabled or disabled.
At least they didn't just delete the post. *cough* apple *cough*
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I was born with two perfectly good nipples, each of which is perfectly capable of producing milk, but the feature was disabled with a few androgens.
Perhaps not quite ready for prime time, but http://freebios.sourceforge.net/ is a nice way to solve this problem. Then if VT doesn't work, you can fix it yourself.
Try searching around for "male lactation"
It's actually not uncommon. If you feel cheated, there are drugs you can take to enable this feature. Some models autoenable this feature for no reason.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I've had bad experiences with HP laptops before. This was several years ago, so I may not remember everything correctly.
My HP Pavilion laptop had the USB controller on IRQ 11, but, according to 2 out of 3 BIOS tables, it was on IRQ 9. This caused USB not to work under Linux. HP and the BIOS vendor apparently weren't interested in fixing the issue, so, eventually, it was worked around with a patch to Linux. According to what I've heard, the USB controller worked under Windows, but would reset every 5 minutes.
Around the time the warranty expired (I don't recall if it was just before or just after), the cooling fan started to get stuck. This would result in it making an awful lot of noise, followed soon enough by the system shutting down, because of overheating. After several requests to various addresses and phone numbers at HP, they offered that I could send the laptop in for repair, and they'll put in a new fan and send it back to me. Unfortunately, the operation would have cost more money than it was worth to me.
Also, the socket where the power adapter connects to the laptop broke. I eventually figured out how to open the laptop, get everything out of the way to get to the socket, and put everything back together. However, I never really succeeded in fixing the socket. I tried everything from soldering to chewing gum, but it kept breaking again. Just before I decided to fix the adapter plug to the socket (thus hopefully keeping the two connected and in place), the hard disk finally got so many bad sectors that it couldn't be used anymore. I gave the laptop away to a friend who said he'd fix and sell it, but a week later I found it on the sidewalk, thrown out of the window.
All in all, I think I got about a year and a half out of the laptop. After that, I bought an iBook, which I just sold last summer, apparently still working perfectly after two years of heavy use (more than the HP was ever subjected to). Pleased with Apple, but not wanting to make the switch to the Macbook just yet, I got another iBook before they ran out. It will take quite some convincing to get me to buy HP again, and I have a lasting aversion of moving parts in computers.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If HP released this upgrade in functionality with a firmware update, would the previous article on /. entitled "Apple Charges For 802.11n, Blames Accounting Law" link - http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/16/ 2127204 violate the same Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Does anyone else anticipate paying for updates to get features that were originally promised?
http://www.vistahelpforum.com/
Windows Vista Help Forum
A little over a year ago I bought an HP laptop (I've forgotten the model) as a gift for my mother. First thing I did after getting it out of the box was wipe it clean of the pre-installed xp home edition and tons of advertising. With a new OS installed, I discovered that the processor, optical drive, and something else (I forget the 3rd item) were scaled down to barely functional speeds. After investigation, I discovered that those bits would not operate without specialized drivers that were not available for download. Further investigation suggests that the drivers may have existed for xp home only, even excluding pro.
Needless to say, the laptop was returned and I called alienware the next day.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
This is yet another Slashdot article that assumes too much. I don't think the average reader is going to know what "VT" is. I certainly don't. It shouldn't be necessary to click through a link to understand the gist of what this story is about. VT should be explained in the synopsis.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Well, the Poweredge Servers are a bit of a different beast. I was speaking more along the lines of the desktops (specifically the Opti and PWS lines), which, uh, apparently I was wrong on. ... Huh.
Well, Color me surprised! Guess it's time to ask a few senior techs for clarification -- I know at this time we're not "supporting" it, but I can find no rhyme nor reason to which ones have it in the BIOS and which ones don't.
Which is not that the OP couldn't find the meaning of 'VT', but that it's a basic writing skill to define any acronyms or abbreviations the first time you use them.
I'm sure they know what Wikipedia is, they were merely pointing out an obvious problem with the story.
Read Pynchon.
I work as an HP repair tech (currently.) We've had HUNDREDS of laptops sent in for repair for this reason.
It's really sad how HP features things, but disables them. I had to repair a DV9000 with the webcam built-in, because the webcam wasn't seen.
The spot for the webcam to hook up wasn't even tere. HP had installed a de-featured board instead of a fully-featured board.
This is everyday at HP. Nothing to see here, move along.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As a long time Xen user and one of the very first non Xen developer to run hardware virtualized OS under Xen on Intel hardware, I can say something that most here are missing: if you install Xen as the hypervisor and then launch an unmodified OS, like Windows, using hardware virtualization (you ain't launching an unmodified OS under Xen without hardware virtualization anyway), the unmodified OS will *not* see a VT-capable system. Which means that if you install Xen in the first place, as a knowledgeable Xen/Linux user, it's gonna be *very* hard for a Windows virus to be able to attack Xen/Linux. You can run Xen under Xen (that's an indisputable fact, I've done it) but you fscking can NOT run an hardware virtualized system under another hardware virtualized system (that is another undisputable fact). Now conceptually there may be an workable exploit one day, but being able to attack the hypervisor from an OS seeing a non-VT system would be one heck of a hack (a bit like being able to crash a computer configured as a completely passive sniffer behind a one-way ethernet cable or a shomiti tap). In other words, it is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Moreover saying that an hypotetical "hypervisor exploit" would be undetectable is complete rubbish bullshit: it's not any more difficult to detect than to detect a root exploit. Anyone who consider that scanning a machine from itself is a safe way of detecting malware is a fool anyway. You take the system offline, hook it's hard disk to a known good system (or boot it using a live CD) and voila... Gameover rootkit, game over hypervisor "undetectable" malware.
(and if you want to play the "my servers can't be taken down" I'll fire back with a "what punk, you're telling me you've got a SPOF?").
What Xen buys you if you want, though, is free (from Linux) scanning / SHA1-summing / etc. of Windows systems without the Windows systems even *knowing* it is happening. Game over Windows "rootkits". Plain and simple.
I hope that by now you realize that if you run Xen/Linux then Windows under Xen using VT, it is *impossible* for a virus to act as the hypervisor and then to present you with a 'fake' Xen/Linux hypervisor that would allow you to run Windows. That's how VT in this day and Intel age works. It may change, but as of now: move along, nothing to see here.
(OK, OK, a *really* incredible virus could make you think you're running Windows using HVM though Windows would actually be running under QEMU... But that would be one heck of a hack and you'd notice QEMU's extreme slowness in emulation mode... No accelerated QEMU under Xen).
Hypervisor rootkits can't counter timing-attacks based detection either.
Windows running under Xen is way more secure than running on the bare metal. Dot.
So please, stop all the uninformed "oh my god VT is teh insecure tech!".
To me running Windows under Xen is the most secure thing that happened to Windows in ages (and, no, I wasn't that much of a VMWare fan).
VT is the vertical tab.
Octal: 013
Decimal: 11
Hex: 0x0B
C escape: \v
It's the Control-K character.
When sent to the console, it seems to go down a line or two.
I can't see much use for VT.
Acronyms are a way in which like minded people can quickly and efficiently communicate; countless businesses, academic institutions and social groups freely use acronyms as part of an established and understood vocabulary.
Except that in this case "VT" is not part of an established and understood vocabulary.
Of course, we wouldn't ask that question because everyone knows what HP is already. Why's that? Because this is a tech orientated site, of course.
This isn't really a good comparison. Even people without a technology background know what "HP" stands for.
I've been involved with and around computers and electronics since the late 1970s, and today is the first day in a long time that I've encountered the abbreviation "VT". It means "Video Terminal", right? Or is it "Video Tape"?
It's AEP (accepted editorial practice, but you knew that already, right?) to put the meaning of an abbreviation in parentheses next to its first use in a journalism piece, so you're sure the reader understands what you're talking about - unless you're writing an abbreviation knowledge test.
Putting moderation advice in your
It's nice to know that they're working on it, though, and they do have a preliminary solution for those of us who REALLY need it.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925