I have a Lenovo Thinkpad A485 with a AMD Ryzen 2700U. Not the newest laptop but still modern. I installed both Windows 10 & Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS onto it (dual boot) and everything has been running fine.
Yesterday I wanted to see what kind of virtualization antics I could get into with it so I installed virt-manager on Ubuntu and enabled AMD-V in the BIOS. While downloading a Windows.ISO the browser suddenly stopped downloading and said I had a permissions issue. Something about not being able to write to the downloads folder. Suddenly there was a kernel panic and I was given 100’s of lines of errors saying nothing could be written to disk that it was write protected.
One reboot later everything was behaving (seemingly). Downloaded the .ISO got Windows installed in the VM. Started downloading updates when suddenly the system froze and I had to hard reboot.
I decided to try disabling AMD-V and for the past 24 hours the laptop has been fine.
I don’t know if this is a hardware issue or a hardware/software compatibility issue. I haven’t tried setting up Oracle VM Virtualbox or Hyper-V on Windows yet but I fear I’ll see the same behavior.
Does anybody know if this is just a known Ryzen mobile CPU issue? I’ve had no issues with virtualization and even hardware pass-through with my desktop 1950X.
Sound weird. Make sure that the Laptop firmware is up to date and that your kernel is running at least 4.19, I don’t use Ubuntu 20.04 uses so I don’t know what is current. Also make sure you have installed the latest non-free firmware from the Ubuntu repo.
BIOS is on the latest.
Ubuntu Kernel is 5.4.0-53-generic.
I’m not familiar with non-free Ubuntu repos. If they cost something it’s not worthwhile to me too pay. I don’t NEED virtualization working on this laptop it’d just be a nice-to-have thing.
I also have yet to test AMD-V on Windows 10. It’s not impossible that this is just a Linux issue but I’d much rather use QEMU/KVM on Linux as my hypervisor as oppose to Windows Oracle VB or Hyper-V.
Sorr, clarification. In the GNU/Linux world, non-free means proprietary (read not opensource) code, binaries, and etc. That does not mean that you have to pay money for them, just that the do not adhere to the F/LOSS or FSF standard of freedom.
This is common on Debian and Red Hat distros where they aim to package all free items to the end user and make you manually add or opt into pulling non-free packages. but it looks like Ubuntu no longer follows this Debian guideline.
So performed a apt update && apt upgrade && apt install linux-firmware and then reboot the machine.
With that said, if you are still having issues, then I recommend trying to run MS Windows natively to see if the problem still persists. The machine was designed with MS Windows in mind so if it run MS Windows perfectly fine, then you are more than likely dealing with a kernel support issue. We can then troubleshoot from there.
1 Like
Sorry for taking a few days. Very busy.
Ran through the updates, installed SPICE Guest Tools, played around a bit ran a benchmark and so far it appears stable. When Windows is starting/stopping it has a little tendency to hang with the spinning logo but other than that the host has been behaving.
I’ll report back if that changes though. Previously Ubuntu wasn’t happy even without the VM running so I’m going to give it a few days before calling it good.
1 Like