[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Xen-users] HP Proliant DL145g3, xen-3.1.0 and SVM





On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Stephan Seitz wrote:
(XEN) AMD SVM Extension is disabled in BIOS.

I went through the trouble of commenting out the check in the xen kernel
for the bios disable flag and basically lie to xen and it panics
horribly on boot.

As expected. You can't paint a traffic light green and expect not to crash ;)

I've also flashed the bios to the latest version from the hp site as of
today and gone through it hunting for anything to do with
virtualization, but can't find an option there.  I've also had someone
else look for the option and he failed to find it as well.

At this point have I conclusively determined that the problem lies in
HP's BIOS and not having anything to do with Xen?

I don't know how the bios of this particular proliant model is setup, but
an all recent x86 platforms i've seen so long, there is the need of turning
on svm (amd) or vmx (intel) at the bios. I've never had problems with
supermicro or tyan, but there have been discussions on the list which
generally shows that if there's no bios option, there's no svm/vmx at all.

There were some previous discussions I found which seemed to be claiming that SVM always worked and that you didn't need a BIOS option and that if it showed up /proc/cpuinfo it should just work. Hence, my test of painting the traffic light green to see if the cars would just magically avoid each other or not...

Clearly, for both SVM and VMX the BIOS needs to support HVM and there should be a switch in the BIOS to enable/disable it. And the DL145g3 BIOS does not support SVM/HVM at this time.

I've got a request into our vendor to pester HP about this issue and try to see if HP might have an internal beta BIOS which enables SVM...

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users


 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.