Hyper-v screen resolution in Ubuntu VM with RemoteFX video adapter [closed]

Question

I am using Hyper-V for the first time on a Windows 10 installation where I am having some issues with screen resolution in my Ubuntu 18.04 desktop VM.

Guides propose these actions in order to configuration screen resulution for linux based VMs:

Edit grub:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Add video=hyperv_fb:1920x1080:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1920x1080"

Update grub:

sudo update-grub

And then reboot.

That works just fine until you want to use RemoteFX 3D Video Adapter which suddenly changes the screen resolution down to 800x600. Moving windows and browsing the web in the VM seems fine and in Hyper-v Manager under "Physical GPUs" it says "1 virtual machine are currently using this GPU".

I have seen suggestion where installing linux-image-extra-virtual package will provide a HyperV display driver but that seems to change nothing. Maybe I am missing something here?

So I am looking for input for how I can be able to use RemoteFX and have a usable resolution in my Ubuntu VM. Suggestions?

Answer 1

I was having an identical problem and solved it by doing the following:

1. Added RemoteFX 3D Video Adapter to my Ubuntu 16.04 VM in Hyper-V (performance of the VM without RemoteFX was unusable).

2. Powered up Ubuntu VM and ran:

   sudo hwinfo --framebuffer

This returned a list of all the available screen sizes. I chose one of the sizes (1600x1024) which best suited my display.

3. Edited the /etc/default/grub file and added the lines:

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1600x1024"

   GRUB_GFXMODE=1600x1024

4. Saved the grub file and then updated the settings by running:

   sudo update-grub

5. Restarted the Ubuntu VM and it worked! I had a bigger screen size and the graphic performance was a lot better. My problem was that I had changed the grub file with a screen size (1366x768) that was not available in the list output from the hwinfo command. I'm assuming that when RemoteFX is used, the values used in the grub file MUST match one of the available screen sizes shown in hwinfo. When these values didn't match up, the display size shown by the VM was the smallest default size which for me was 800x600, far too small.