What do you know about BIOS NVRAM hacking?

[flintstone]

wagDj,

I have same BIOS version and this will be my last Sony VAIO.

I already called Sony for so many times and the answer I get is "Sony currently does not support Virtualization but check for the future BIOS release". I hate Sony .... no drivers for x64 OS + VT = "Dont buy Sony"

Anybody out-there can help us pleaseeeeeeee.

Thanks

[tea]

Let me add my $0.02 to the jar. To enable VT on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pro V3505 with latest (and probably the last) BIOS v. R0G - which isn't offering VT support despite some relevant strings in its string section, set following tokens in NVRAM to 0001 (I used symcmos):

258 - this is the flag which enable VT support (that is, enable following flags to work); "symcmos -L" doesn't list it, one'll need to add it to LITERAL.TXT
25B - this one is VT-x enable flag; "symcmos -L" lists it

If you want to get VT working on Amilo Pro V3505, you need to set both flags to 0001

also there is token 279 which corresponds to bit 1 (mask 0x2) of MSR 0x3A, apparently this is VT-in-SMX support enable. Of course BIOS doesn't offer any means to turn this on and "symcmos -L" doesn't list it; I didn't touched this one but maybe it'll be useful for somebody.

[bughunter2]

Hey,

After reading this thread for a while, I began poking around in the code of my BIOS, and found this in BIOSCOD6.ROM, at offset 0xCCAB:

Code: Select all

    mov ecx, 0x3a ; MSR 0x3a
    rdmsr ; read the MSR
    mov ebx, eax ; save low-order 32-bits of the MSR value
    mov ax, 0x30f
    call word 0xf000:0x3d40
    jz skipVT ; skip enabling VT if token at offset 0x30f equals 0
    mov ax, 0x312
    call word 0xf000:0x3d40
    jz skipVT ; skip enabling VT if token at offset 0x312 equals 0
    or ebx, 0x4
    mov ax, 0x330
    call word 0xf000:0x3d40
    jz skipVT ; skip enabling VT if token at offset 0x330 equals 0
    or ebx, 0x2 ; set VMX bit
skipVT:
    mov eax, ebx
    test al, 0x1
    jnz 0x3e
    or eax, 0x1 ; lock MSR
    wrmsr ; write the MSR
    popad


Phoenix BIOS winphlash image filename: BL50360A.WPH (V3.60)
Laptop model: Acer5633 WLMi

With the symcmos utility I could control the 0x312 bit, so I tried setting it to 1, and it enabled VT-x.

Thought I should post this information here. It might just help someone someday.