Hardware virtualisation and Wiki misinformation - cautionary
 

Greetings!

Been playing with VBox for a while, got serious earlier this year with QEMU and KVM in Ubuntu 8.04.x LTS, mostly. When choosing a machine for KVM, the CPU virtualisation hooks are clearly critical, so we had a look for lists of CPUs with this information, and landed inevitably onto the usually excellent Wikipedia.

I'll need to repeat this research before posting any links, but there was a problem with (eg) lists of AMD CPUs being labelled as AMD-V compatible, but deeper investigation on the AMD site suggested the opposite.

Think there were a few Intel ones similarly mislabelled on Wikipedia, but cannot be sure. Need to check.

A majority of popular CPUs seem to lack virtualisation hardware, to date. Which is a pity since it does seem to have a (small) performance advantage.

So.... take care with cpu choice, folks. Will try to make this a bit more rigorous when time permits.

All the best, Ben

Thought I might contribute to this thread a link:

Intel Processor Spec Finder

This allows you to narrow down which Intel processors support which features (such at VT-x hardware virtualization).

once you install kvm, lsmod for kvm_intel or kvm_amd, if the module doesn't load, you have VT disabled or you don't have it. its the easiest way of checking

tw, if you enable VT in BIOS, make sure you do a full powercycle of the system, not just save changes and reboot.