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

[Lamont Granquist <lamont@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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...
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