First of all, do not try what I’ve done in this post. It may be a dangerous operation and could destroy your computer.
I bought a Lenovo G50-45 laptop about a year ago, intending to turn it into my personal development machine running Ubuntu. The price tag of about 450 dollars seemed right for a secondary computer. As soon as I got it, I installed Ubuntu as planned. The installation went without any issues. Great! I was very pleased until one day I decided to install VirtualBox and set up the hardware to support virtualization (AMD-V). I went into the BIOS settings and noticed there was no way to enable AMD-V. I didn’t have time to dig further, so I simply concluded, without much investigation, that this particular CPU didn’t support hardware virtualization.
A few months have passed since then, and now I’ve decided to run Android Studio on it. Once again, the virtualization issue came back. This time I did a bit more digging and found out that the hardware does support virtualization. OK! Great! Except that it was once again telling me to go into my BIOS setup and enable virtualization.
sudo kvm-ok
[sudo] password for *****:
INFO: /dev/kvm does not exist
HINT: sudo modprobe kvm_amd
INFO: Your CPU supports KVM extensions
INFO: KVM (svm) is disabled by your BIOS
HINT: Enter your BIOS setup and enable Virtualization Technology (VT),
and then hard poweroff/poweron your system
KVM acceleration can NOT be used
I asked my dearest friend, Mr. Google, and this is what I found:
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-B-and-G-Series-Notebooks/G50-45-Virtualization/td-p/1664345
In short, the BIOS setup utility has a bug and doesn’t include the virtualization option, but updating the BIOS fixes the problem. This solution seemed simple and reasonable until I realized Lenovo only provides a Windows executable. I have Ubuntu...
DO NOT TRY THIS! THIS MAY DESTROY YOUR MOTHERBOARD AND MAKE YOUR COMPUTER USELESS. I REPEAT: DO NOT TRY WHAT I DESCRIBE FROM HERE ON.
So I thought, if only I could run a Windows executable on an Ubuntu machine, the problem would be solved. Surely some smart person out there had already figured this out. And yes, there is such a thing, called WINE. I tried it, and it didn’t work. Actually, it’s a good thing it didn’t. I later learned that using WINE for this could damage a motherboard badly enough to need a new one. See this Ubuntu documentation for more details: BIOSUpdate.
That document also suggests many other ways to update the BIOS. However, I haven’t tried any of them yet, because I didn’t have the extra disk I’d need, and most of all, it’s a bit of a tricky thing to do.
