[Novalug] Re: virtualization Now

[Jay Hart]

Never heard of this BIOS option:  hardware virt

Since my manual has no mention of it, and my board is 3-4 years old, I'm going
to assume it doesn't exist as an option for me to enable.

I am running the latest firmware for the board and an AMD chip.

Jay

> On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 19:49 -0500, Jay Hart wrote:
>> This is what I get as a result of reading /proc/cpuinfo.  Does this mean I
>> lack support for virtualization?
> [...snip of 'cat /proc/cpuinfo'...]
>> flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca
>> cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow up ts
>
> If you don't see "vmx" (Intel) or "svm" (AMD) your CPU doesn't support
> *hardware* virtualization.  That doesn't mean you can't run VMs, just
> that you will not get the benefit of hardware acceleration.  On some
> motherboards you may need to make sure your BIOS also has the hardware
> virt enabled, because it is possible for your CPU to support hardware
> virt -- it will still show the flag in /proc/cpuinfo -- while the
> motherboard has the capability disabled.  This also implies that you
> can't just swap in a hardware virt-capable CPU onto any old motherboard
> and get an immediate benefit.
>