Laptops and hardware virtualization

[Charles Bennett]

This is such a PITA problem.  Intel uses VT as a market differentiating
feature.

You need to be able to get fairly exact specs from the vendor about the
processor being used.

I've found this page helpful to sort out Intel chips:
   http://processorfinder.intel.com/


AMD is easier.  Everything currently in the market that's not Sempron
has the virtualization support.

As for BIOS settings...  I've only seen Dell do this thing where you
have to choose VT in the BIOS but I don't get out much.

My ThinkPad T61p (very nice, corporate issued) has VT support.  Most of
the T-series do.

There appear to be some Dell Precision laptops that have Nehalem (!) and
will certainly support VT.

The idea that you'd have a laptop without this feature freaks me out.
Most youngsters I know run at least 2 OS, one in virt.  We send our
sales guys out with demos of our Linux-based product running under virt
on their laptops.  Who do they expect to get along without this feature,
Grandma?

ccb


On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 14:12 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Most of the CPU chips out in the field today support hardware
> virtualization (some low-end Intel chips do not).  But, many consumer
> laptops  do not have the chipset or BIOS support. Without the BIOS
> support there is no way to enable the hardware virtualization
> acceleration. Certainly you can run VWWare, Virtualbox and QEMU without
> vhardware support, but it poses some limitations. For instance in
> Virtualbox, you can't run 64-bit guests unless the hardware
> virtualization is enabled.
> I was just wondering what laptops might have support for virtualization.
> I know that the Toshiba Satellite and Acer Aspire do not have BIOS
> support (or the chipset) to support hardware virtualization. However, I
> do know that some business laptops do have virtualization support.
> 
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