virtualbox.org

SMP was the only major thing I was waiting for in VBox. I am very impressed by version 3.0.0.

I just wanted to say thanks to the Sun developers.

Dave

i was not waiting for SMP, ....

I am very impressed by version 3.0.0.

YES!!!1 best VBox.0 release ever! thanks

SMP seems to work pretty good on Debian Lenny host w/ Xeon E5420 quad

Yes! I was a little nervous in the betas, but the release is great. Thanks guys and well done!

I did some tests with my dual core and 2 virtual SMP, and the XP VM I have seems sluggish.
I would like to know if I am the only one experiencing this slowness when using virtual SMP.

When you try to use a VM with two vCPUs on a (single) dual core, there is no CPU core left for VirtualBox itself and the host OS. Each time VirtualBox or some other process on the host needs to do something the VM must pause to free a cpu core. So nothing is wrong on your system, except you don't have the ressources to use virtual SMP at normal speed.

Martin

Sorry, but that doesn't make much sense. If VB required a free CPU just to work, I wouldn't be able to use my computer at all the way I use today, and would be impossible to open many VMs at the same time. I have been using 6 VMs at the same time for testing (2 linux servers, 2 win 2003 servers, 2 xp) in this same computer, and all of them were running smoothly.

Also, its not like I was using both CPUs all the time. The system is idle and was sluggish. If I tried to open notepad, it was thinking for some time. Even to paint the screen it was noticeably slow.

This is either the feature that is in a "beta stage" or something in my guest. This weekend I'll try to install a new guest from scratch to see how things go.

On Ubuntu 9.04 host with 2 core Intel 2160 CPU VB3.0.0 does not allow to use SMP at all. APIC boxie is checked on. Strange...

Are you using a SMP kernel on the guest?

Kernel of guest does not matter at all. VB knows nothing about guest kernel if VM is off.
And by the way most Linux distributions come with unified SMP/uniprocessor kernel now. Enabling SMP does not make linux kernel slower.

If you want to use 2 cores in the guest (I'm assuming this is your complaint, that you cannot use SMP in the guest), you must have a SMP kernel in the guest too. And depending on the OS and version, it may or may not have a SMP enabled kernel already installed by default.

So, if you had a WinXP guest that was installed before 3.0 (and I'm assuming you have XP guest because your profile says so), it probably has the single cpu kernel, and you need to manually install the SMP kernel. Take a look at other threads about this, or google for "windows xp smp kernel".

Or do a new XP install from scratch with 2 or more cpus enabled and your should have it out of the box.

May be I must say again. I run many guests. One of them is WinXP which purpose is cleaning heads of my Cannon printer, nothing more Thus I do not need SMP in WinXP. Profile at this forum is quite silly, it does not allow to put much info.

The main guest I test VB 3.0.0 is Fedora 11, host is Ubuntu 9.04. CPU is Intel 2160, 2 cores. All Fedora kernels are SMP. VB 3.0.0 does not allow me to switch SMP on for ANY guest OS, parameters in this tab are dim and do not react on any mouse clicks.

I know that x.0.0 releases are actually not even beta software, it is pre-betas nova days according to misunderstood "release early, release often" paradigm. And I am not complaining. I am reporting state of things. But one thing I'd like to see is attention to problems reported, not an ignorance and fooling.

Martin wrote:When you try to use a VM with two vCPUs on a (single) dual core, there is no CPU core left for VirtualBox itself and the host OS. Each time VirtualBox or some other process on the host needs to do something the VM must pause to free a cpu core. So nothing is wrong on your system, except you don't have the ressources to use virtual SMP at normal speed.

Martin

No thats crap. If what you say was true then nobody could run a VM proper with just one single core cpu.
Fact is that multicore support is totally broken and should have never ever passed beta stage.
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 399#p84399
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19549

No thats crap. If what you say was true then nobody could run a VM proper with just one single core cpu.
Fact is that multicore support is totally broken and should have never ever passed beta stage.
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 399#p84399
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19549

Thanks, that is what I wanted to see, if more people were having the same issue.

I agree partially with you with the beta thing. I think its good to release earlier, release often, even if the feature is not 100% complete. It would be good to have a message in the manual or changelogs saying "experimental" though.

I mean, I know this is new and of course experimental because I have been using VB since 1.4 and I'm used to how some features are implemented. But having a clear message from the developers somewhere saying "test it, but don't expect a good performance yet" would help a lot in the expectations.