How to Enable Intel VT and AHCI on a Napa/Santa Rosa platform Phoenix BIOS Vaio laptop

[bogart]

Originally Posted by apollo4400

Thanks, ill try. The question is, how big can be the risk of doing this. Is there any chance by changing the registries to block the bios for good without any chance of restoring it back? Is there a guarantee that anytime when bios will freeze it can be restored normaly with battery removal?
Are there types of registry entries that musn't be changed?
Should I try only with registries in which the value is [0000]?
Is it always [0001] the replacement value that I should experiment with?

I'm trying to deal this through some bios dumpers and debuggers. I've found Phoenix BIOS Edior 2.2, WinPhlash an DMIScope. What I couldn't find is some good bios dumper that dumps bios in .rom or .wph extension, so i can read it with phoenix bios editor? any suggestions ? Can some software debugger explicitly tell me by analysing the bios which registers are for what?

Removing the CMOS battery will clear the NVRAM and reset everything to default, including the real-time clock, so you should be safe. I've never experimented with your model, so I don't know what you shouldn't change, but maybe you can tell us once you try. You should only modify the [0000] values because all the disable/enable conditions are set to boolean values. You can test this by comparing NVRAM dumps before and after a modifiable enable/disable setting in the BIOS is changed.

I tried all versions of WinPhlash I could find to dump the BIOS that's already loaded on my SZ a long time ago, but none of them were able to do it. I don't know any other way using only software, but once an update is released you can extract the .wph image with Universal Extractor and read it with Phoenix BIOS Editor to see all the hidden settings or, if you know what you're doing, mess around with it with the phnxdeco, prepare and catenate utilities.

[dmorris68]

Originally Posted by raul

You can run virtualization without VT with Vmware, VirtualBox etc. Infact if you look at some of the forum discussions at Vmware forums its not clear cut that enabling VT in bios will 'definitely' give you any performance benefits. There is debate of the benefits of enabling VT vs using the normal virtualization and the performance benefits if any, you will notice the performance benefits even if realized are not that great. Of course maybe in advanced virtualization scenarios VT could help.

But on my windows box with VirtualBox I have tried both VT and without and the difference is really not noticeable on X86 yet.

VT (and the equivalent AMD-V extension) itself isn't about increasing performance, per se, although they do enable greater performance through level 1 hypervisors like Xen, which run on the "bare metal" instead of inside a host OS. Prior to VT-x/AMD-V extensions, guest OSes had to be patched to run on such a hypervisor, which ruled out Windows and other closed-source guests. Now, however, Windows can take advantage of Xen's superior (near-native) performance if VT-x/AMD-V is present.

VMWare Desktop & Server (Free), VirtualBox, Virtual PC, etc. are level 2 hypervisors that run inside a host OS and are thus much slower. VT may help performance and/or VM stability a slight amount in those cases, but not significantly compared to something like Xen or KVM.

BTW, does anybody know if the AR6x0 series has VT enabled? I think I'm about to get a AR670-CTO and will definitely be interested in enabling it.

[DanyBui81]

I have no idea what you just said but sounds good

[blackbird07]

Originally Posted by apollo4400

The question is, how big can be the risk of doing this.

In one word: HIGH! In a fit of suicidal levity I tried to change the 0000s to 0001s in blocks of approx. 30 at a time, always thinking the worst case outcome would be a bios reset by taking out the battery. Unfortunately, in my 4th or 5th run, the laptop kept stuck at startup boot screen. Even hitting F2 or F10 or any other key did not work any more. Unfortunately, taking out the bios-battery was not as easy as I thought. In my FZ21S it's located beneath the bottom right corner of the touchpad. Assuming it's the same with your machine, you would have to disassembly the whole laptop. It's definitely not worth that.
By the way, I did not continue my tests afterwards ...

[pdudas]

What are the benefits of AHCI?

I measured 45MB/s drive index before and after too in Sisoft Sandra....
So it is not faster than the normal controller installed from the factory drivers (on SZ4)

[alaska_sz691]

Thanks a lot bogart! I successfully did this on my sz691 and it worked perfectly. I used a usb flash drive with FreeDOS and it worked just fine. Also, to anyone who is wondering, VT is necessary to run 64-bit Virtual Machines inside of a 32-bit OS.

Thanks again to bogart!

[MxMoney]

I am new to VMWare and have always wanted to know more? I installed Microsoft's free virtual OS client called Virtual PC 2007 and it ran pretty snappy with the XP OS installed. Other than support for Linux what are other reasons or benefits why people would use VMWare over Virtual PC in a Vista system? Thanks in advance.

[dmorris68]

For modern guest OS's, VMWare's reliability, performance, and features pretty stoutly beat Virtual PC. I've run both for years, the only reason I keep running Virtual PC is that I have some legacy MS-DOS systems that I have to support, and that's the one OS that VPC runs much better than VMWare. And VMWare doesn't care about improving DOS support, for pretty obvious reasons. I was at a VMWare conference a couple years ago, and asked them about it, and that was basically their response.

So I run my DOS VM's in VPC, and everything else in VMWare (on a Windows host). For Linux hosts, I run either VirtualBox (free, also for Windows), VMWare Server, or Xen.

BTW, back on topic: I just received my VGN-AR670 and am interesting in the VT hack for it (probably AHCI too, but certainly VT). Has anyone done these yet? I'll be poking around with the BIOS tools myself to try and find it, but was hoping someone had done the grunt work already.

[MxMoney]

Dmorris68,
Your posts are very helpful. Thanks for the breakdown on VMWare vs VPC.

[dmorris68]

You're quite welcome. I'm obviously new here to the forums, and this is my first Sony notebook, but I've been an engineer, developer, and all-around tech geek for over 20 years. I try to help where I can.