[Xen-users] Unable to boot a full virtualized guest with two or more processors on a Xeon-VT platform

[Philippe Berthault <Philippe.Berthault@xxxxxxxx>]

On my VT platform (4 dual-core Xeon-VT processors with 16 GB RAM), I am 
unable to boot a full virtualized guest domain with two or more 
processors. This problem is independent of the guest type, in example I 
have this problem with Linux Knoppix, Linux Mandriva, Windows 2003, 
Windows XP, etc... In all cases, the guest OS recognizes only one processor.

I've seen that VMware has already related this problem on its comparison 
between VMware ESX and Xen 3.0.3. An extract of the document "A 
Performance Comparison of Hypervisors" found found on the WMware web site:
 " The tests for both virtual SMP configuration as well as virtual 
machine scalability could not be run due to issues with the Xen 
virtualization hypervisor. A two virtual CPU Windows guest could not be 
booted using the Xen hypervisor.
 The virtual machine scalability tests could not be run because more 
than two uniprocessor Windows guests could not be booted using the Xen 
hypervisor. At this time, it is not known when this issue will be fixed 
and the tests can be tried again.
 While Xen claims to support virtual SMP and virtual machine 
scalability, the results from these experiments demonstrate that 
enterprise customers should run their own tests to make sure such 
configurations actually work."

I confirm that SMP doesn't work on Xen 3.0.3 on Xeon-VT platform while 
XenSource has denigrate this fact.
When trying to boot a multiprocessors Linux guest, I've the following 
messages on the guest log:
...
CPU0: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.60Ghz stepping 08
SMP alternatives: switching to SMP code
Booting processor 1/1 eip 3000
Not responding.
Inquiring remote APIC #1...
... APIC #1 ID: failed
... APIC #1 VERSION: failed
... APIC #1 SPIV: failed
CPU#1 not responding - cannot use it.
Total of 1 processors activated (5225.61 BogoMIPS).
...


I'am using the Xen version (3.0.3) of Red Hat, RHEL-5 official version.
Anyone has an idea of what is the problem ?
Thanks.


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