I am having a strange issue ...

When I am running RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) 5.1 on a P4 machine with hyper threading, the 'Virtual System Manager' will not let me create a 'fully virtualized' machine and in fact this choice is grayed out and not available.

I have looked thru the setup in the BIOS and there is nothing that allows me to turn on a virtualization support so it is my belief that para-virtualization is my only choice on that machine.

HOWEVER

When I load Fedora 9 on the same machine, the opposite is true. In this case, the 'para-virtualization' choice is greyed out and 'fully virtualized' is the only choice I can make. moreover it wants the network card (eth0) to be in 'bridge mode' in order to load a virtualized machine bound to the same network card as the host machine.

Whats the deal with this, it was my belief that without the hardware virtual support, para-virtualization is my only choice.

Is there a bug in Fedora 9 or can anyone shed some light on this for me ??

Your help is greatly appreciated.

well fedora 9 is *MUCH* newer than rhel 5, so will have much more up to date versions of Xen (3.2 vs 3.1), providing better compatibility and such. no bug here, and certainly not on the fedora side - why would you assume that the system giving you *better* performance would be the one at fault? what cpu is this running on? most modern Intel and AMD chips support full virtualization now - http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...s-support.html