virtualbox.org

I have Ubuntu 64bit and want to use virualbox to run one particular program, sibelius. Wine is very unreliable so visualizing is basically my only option.

The trouble is that sibelius (a score editing program) tops out the CPU when it plays back a lot of instruments

This is because I'm only using one core which is a real annoyance,

Any posts I've found about Guest SMP seem to show it as low priority, but as more people get multi core systems it will surely become more important.

The posts I've found are pretty old so I'm asking for an update on the situation

There's also a poll, (hopefully) so feel free to vote

AFAIK, guest SMP is on the roadmap, as you can see from the VirtualBox.xml + the VBox.logs. However, I would guess that it's a Version 3.0 target.

you're not really using just one core though - on the host the virtualbox process spreads the load across multiple cores, although sometimes you can see it pegs just one cpu.

i don't think guest smp will really do what you expect it to. on vmware it was pretty rubbish and actually slowed down some stuff.

I agree, smp sounds nice and I have simulated it with VB but the results are dissappointing, spreading the load as it is works much better, especially if you have a hanging vm

Trying to do long builds (ones that take hours) on a windows vm inside vb only using 1 core of a 4 core machine is frustrating. I actually ended up having to use vmware server for this. With that SMP works fine cpu wise but the file system performance sucks. I believe this is intentional as vmware server tells you to upgrade to esx for better performance.

I'd love SMP support. I run a lot of applications within my windows box and my system regularly grinds to a halt because the CPU is pegged by just a single utility.

At least with multiple cores I can take advantage of most programs *not* supporting dual core CPU's. It means no one misbehaving application can bring my system to a halt, and makes windows multitask much better.

I also need SMP capability in VBox. I want to use it to test customised OS installation and migration that expects the hardware to present multiple CPUs, which I cannot currently do with VBox...

No point in having a poll about it, it's already in 3.0... The only thing is that 3.0 is still in Beta. Beta 2 seems MUCH better than Beta 1 BTW. Still not production ready, but MUCH closer!