emekadavid said:
how does one check to see if hardware virtualization is disabled
for his bios? I installed kvm virtualization files into my system (fedora)
but when i "egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo"-ed, the command returned
no output but the yum install returned installation complete.
I saved the whole of /proc/cpuinfo for my E8400...
http://ark.intel.com/products/33910/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processor-E8400-6M-Cache-3_00-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB
"Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) - Yes"
and with the BIOS enabled or disabled, the flags values
are reported the same. Both strings have "vmx smx".
flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc
arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est
tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi
flexpriority
flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat
pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc
arch_perfmon pebs bts aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est
tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 xsave lahf_lm dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi
flexpriority
My processor doesn't do VT-d, which as far as I can remember
is the presence of an IOmmu. My processor has VT-x though.
Linux is tricky when it comes to the BIOS. When the hardware
has a "trap door", then Linux has no choice but to listen to
the BIOS setting. (A trap door protected register, only
accepts one write operation, and is "closed" after that.)
If the hardware does not have trap door protection
(for security reasons), Linux just does whatever
it feels like. Some other OSes, are less presumptuous.
To give an example of that, try this. Go into the BIOS, and
disable the SATA port to your data hard drive (the one that
doesn't have the OS on it). Now, boot Linux, and Linux will
ignore the BIOS "disable" on the SATA, and enable and operate
the data hard drive anyway.
Paul
