It's well known (via past posts of mine here) that NetWare SMP support in Vbox is basically a no go, because NetWare did some reportedly screwy things that were non-standard to do SMP. But, that, I am hoping, is for NetWare 5.x and up, which appears to rely on the ACPIDRV.PSM module for handling SMP.
So I thought, what about NetWare 4.x? That uses the old MPS v1.4 stuff to do SMP, via MPS14.PSM. So I threw 6 CPUs into my working/stable NW42 VM (yeah, yeah, I know, 6 CPUs is overkill for NW), booted into MS-DOS first, then ran "SERVER -ns" to abort STARTUP.NCF, and then attempted to load MPS14.PSM manually. This is the output I get:
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Loading module MPS14.PSM
Platform Support Module for NetWare 4.11 SMP and MPS v1.4 compliant systems.
Version 1.00u April 8, 1999
Copyright (C) 1987-1999 Novell, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
System is not MPS Compliant
FATAL: errors getting MPS hardware configuration
SERVER-4.11-1553: Module initialization failed.
Module MPS14.PSM NOT loaded
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00:00:01.708666 PcBios: [SMP] BIOS with 6 CPUs
00:00:01.708755 PcBios: MPS table at 000e1300
After all, this is NetWare 4 we're talking about here. One of the most legendary OSes ever crafted by the hands of mere mortals. Such systems could run for *years* without a single patch and never suffer any kind of problems...
PS, SMP is still broke on NetWare 6.5. Parity error from the system board...which given this is a VM, seems rather odd. Wouldn't mind helping to chase that one down, since I have working VM's, but I need to know what info is needed. May have to try 5.1 at some point...