Problem with multi-CPU Linux guests
Posted: 17. Mar 2010, 16:04
Until recently I had been running VirtualBox (I think it was the 3.1.4 version) on an OpenSuSE 11.1 32-bit host OS. My only need at the time was to run Windows XP. I was successful in running a VM which had two CPU cores assigned to it. My host hardware is two dual-core AMD Opteron 2224 SE chips. Recently I upgraded the host to the 64-bit OpenSuSE 11.2 OS. I downloaded VirtualBox 3.1.4 for 64-bit OpenSuSE and installed that. To test my installation I booted my Windows XP VM and all seemed fine. Now I have need to run some version of Linux as a guest. I have tried two different guest versions ... the 32-bit Centos 5.4 and the 64-bit OpenSuSE 11.2. The installation and running of these VMs seem to work when only a single CPU is used, but fail when 2 CPUs are specified. My first failure occurred after finishing the Centos install and then altering the VM to use 2 CPUs. I assumed that failure was because the installer only saw one CPU and installed a non-SMP kernel, so I re-attempted the install by creating the VM as a 2 CPU VM before I booted the installation disk. This resulted in the installation hanging and errors reported to syslog in the host OS (which is the same behavior I observed before). I get the same result when trying to boot the OpenSuSE installation disk in a VM that has 2 CPUs specified. Any speculation as to what the problem might be? I may attempt to boot my old OS and see if the older install has the same problem.