Laptops and hardware virtualization

[Richard Pieri]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 11:02 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> 
> A while back I tried to set up KVM on my system and it would would not
> let me do it. I could configure and virtualize with QEMU, but not KVM. I
> would double check on Xen as AFAIK, it has required hardware
> virtualization for a number of years even with Xen-aware guests.

I checked both.

As of Xen 3.0, VT-x is required for unmodified guests (Windows 2000/XP) and "legacy" Linux guests.  The docs make no mention of VT-x being required for Xen-aware kernels.  Prior versions of Xen cannot run unmodified guests at all.

Same applies for Citrix XenServer:
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=1681139
"Intel® VT or AMD-V™ required for support of Windows guests"

The current KVM docs state that VT-x is required.  The use of QEMU is not for CPU emulation as I mistakenly believed; it is there to create VM instances and device emulation.

--Rich P.