Re: 64-bit Snow Leopard w/o VT-X

[JustinHoMi]

Hi,

My host is a Mac OS X 10.6.2 (64-bit), and I'm trying to add a 32-bit guest (Windows XP). My Intel processor does not support VT-X, however it is added by default to the guest settings (and there's no way to change it). I'm using VB 3.10.

Is it possible to run a 32-bit guest on a 64-bit host without VT-X? This is going to be quite frustrating to have to boot into 32-bit mode every time I need to use Virtualbox.

Justin

[Perryg]

If you do not turn on IO APIC it should work just fine.
Actually if you look the VT-x/AMD-v may be checked but it should be grayed out.

[JustinHoMi]

I did not enable IO APIC (it was disabled by default).

Interesting enough, when I booted into 32-bit mode I had the exact same problem. VT-x was checked, and grayed out... but the VM would not start b/c they were enabled.

To solve the problem, I manually went into the xml configuration file and disabled VT-x. Everything seems ok now!

[Perryg]

Humm. This is not supposed to happen, but I have heard about a few other that it did happen to like this. I will make a note to the DEVs about it.

[JustinHoMi]

Thanks.

While I'm at it... is there any trick to getting it to recognize more than 1 cpu? This is a quad core, but the selection to change the cpu count is grayed out. The instructions say that IO APIC is required, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I tried changing the preference in the XML config, but it gave me the vx-t error again.

Is this something I should have set prior to installing the guest OS (Windows XP)?

[Perryg]

For SMP you would need hardware-v in the bios and then to turn on VT-x/AMD-v as well as IO APIC.
This would all need to be on when you install the Windows guest. It is possible to convert it but a lot faster to just install it again.

[JustinHoMi]

Ah OK. With all the discussion of vt-x vs software implementations I never realized that vt-x was required for SMP (at least in this case). I guess my next CPU will have it!

Thanks for your speedy help!