Recently Microsoft announced Generation 2 Virtual Machines which really is an UEFI guest without the emulated PCI bus. Initially the only supported Operating Systems were:
- Windows 8 (Integration Services Update Required)
- Windows 8.1
- Windows Server 2012 (Integration Services Update Required)
- Windows Server 2012 R2
Well, now you can add pretty much any Linux distribution to the list right now. Thanks to the hard work being done by the Linux Integration Services team, they’ve got the mainline Linux kernel working right on Hyper-V under a Generation 2 platform. However the only distribution that will install correctly inside a Generation 2 Virtual Machine is OpenSuSE 13.1.
However if you want your Linux distribution to run inside a Generation 2 VM right now, you’ll have to install it manually via debootstrap or something similar. One thing to keep min mind is if your kernel is older than 3.11, you’ll need to either backport specific changes or upgrade to a newer mainline version of the kernel before you can even proceed to install your favorite distribution inside a generation 2 virtual machine.
Integration components wise, most of the modules will load just fine except hyperv_fb, the framebuffer device driver for Hyper-V guests. Unfortunately hyperv_fb is broken under a generation 2 VM hence why you’ll need to have EFI framebuffer support compiled in your kernel or you won’t get any video at all! The same goes for GRUB, it’ll also need efi_uga and efi_gop modules built in your bootx64.efi GRUB image. And oh, did I forget to mention that you’ll also have to disable Secure Boot as Hyper-V doesn’t support any way to loading public certificates into the Secure Boot database?
So if you want to take the plunge on having a Linux Generation 2 VM, be my guest. Start reading those git commit logs and start cherry picking! Remember, your mileage may vary. 😉