Hi all,

Does anyone have any pointers on how I can fix the error 43 on a Windows 10 guest machine? I have manged to setup the guest which has access to my Nvidia GPU on my laptop (which also has an on-board Intel GPU). I've done all the usual settings in QEMU to hide the VM but no matter what I do, nothing seems to work. I know that Nvidia unblocked the drivers from causing this error but, I'm thinking it must only be for drivers whose version is v465+. My GPU is a GT650M and the latest driver is v419.

If anyone has any advice or pointers I would grateful.

Many thanks

You're going to have to narrow that down. Is it

1. A Windows error number?
2. A Nvidia error number?
3. A qemu error number?
4. A linux error number?

If it's linux, this might help That linux error doesn't sound like a big deal, but could mean that half your data had been overwritten, which is kinda nasty.

I'd make a much longer post detailing things that you summarized. Try telling us what's the qemu convention with binary blobs, and help us to get up to speed on this. Oh and change some drivers and report on what that does.

Hi,

Thanks for replying. To be honest I'm not really an expert in KVM stuff so cant go into depth. However, I have followed many articles and have managed to put together some basic knowledge. In a nutshell, I got to the point where I have managed to setup my laptop to allow GPU pass-through to a guest machine (IOMMU, VFIO). I followed a very nice guide and everything more or less fell into place. Then came the time to install the guest OS.

I first tried Windows 7 as I find that to be be quite stable and light on resources. That sees my NVIDIA 650M but has a driver error of 12. Something to do with not having enough system resources. Further reading on the subject reveals that Windows 7 doesn't really have the internals for use as a VM, especially when handling pass-through so best to try Windows 10. I then tried Windows 10 and got slightly further as I managed to install the drivers. However, that gave me a driver error 43. Now the common reason for this is to do with NVIDIA blocking consumer cards from being virtualised. They want you to buy their Enterprise GPUs. A bit more searching and it transpires that NVIDIA had a change of heart and began to allow their cards to be used in a virtualised environment and lifted the block. However, I believe that was with driver version 465+. My latest is v425 so guess they didn't make the cut.

I did do further research and it seems that on-board GPUs may not work anyway as apparently if the laptop has multiplexed on-board and dedicated GPUs that arrangement will not work as there's no way of isolating the 2nd card. However, I wasn't entirely convinced that my laptop was in this category as Windows 10 sees it as hardware but, just won't install the drivers. BTW, I have already added the line to mask my instance of QEMU from being detected as a VM but that doesn't help either.

Sorry I can't get into much techie details as I'm not that well versed on this subject. However, if anyone has any ideas or hints please let me know and I'll try them

Many thanks,

Right. I read your detailed reply.

I'm no virtualization expert either. Qemu works afaict (like wine) by translating system calls from the guest OS to system calls in the host OS. So your error 43 was probably a linux error that occurred in windows, if you get me. But for me, this bit nailed it. Looking at this, I'm reading why your problem can't be solved, and agreeing with it. You'd need a pcie card, and yours is integrated. This is a game you're going for, I gather, as you want the nvidia graphics? Your handle is also a hint . Have you tried under wine?