Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Jerry Feldman
On 09/27/2009 07:36 PM, Michael ODonnell wrote: > Not certain I understand what you're saying but processors in this family > come out of their power-on Reset state in their simplest, least capable > mode - interrupts disabled, MMU disabled, 20bit Real Mode addressing, > etc - and each increase in

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Tom Buskey
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > > 1. Most systems disable the VT extensions in the BIOS by default (AMD > and Intel)> I have an AMD quad core Opteron with VMX, with a Tyan mother > board. The VMX bit shoed up in the processor flags (/proc/cpuinfo), but > I found it was dis

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Jerry Feldman
On 09/28/2009 09:06 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: > Of all the hypervisors, I feel VirtualBox is the easiest to maintain. > I've done VMware Server, ESXi and played with KVM. I wonder about the > performance differences but not enough to test :-) I agree. My company uses VMWare Workstation running under

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Thomas Charron
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: > On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > Of all the hypervisors, I feel VirtualBox is the easiest to maintain.  I've > done VMware Server, ESXi and played with KVM.  I wonder about the > performance differences but not enough to

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Lloyd Kvam
On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 08:17 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote: > 2. Under Linux your choices for VMMs (Virtual Machine Managers) are > basically KVM/QEMU, QEMU(software), Xen, Virtualbox, and VMWare. Xen > and KVM do use the virtualization hardware. I was hoping to get myself a laptop where I could simpl

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Neil Joseph Schelly
On Monday 28 September 2009 08:17:38 am Jerry Feldman wrote: > needed because, in general, performance is more critical. I'm not sure > if Virtualbox supports 64-bit guests, but KVM/QEMU and VMWare certainly > do. Both KVM, QEMU, and Virtualbox are released via the GPL license. I'm > not sure about

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Tom Buskey
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Thomas Charron wrote: > On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > > Of all the hypervisors, I feel VirtualBox is the easiest to maintain. > I've > > done VMware Server, ESXi and played with KVM

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Alex Hewitt
Ben Scott wrote: > On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 7:59 PM, Thomas Charron wrote: > >> Intel's VT-x extensions *MUST* be enabled and supported by BIOS. >> I'm not sure why ... >> > > I seem to recall this facet of the design being sold as a security > feature. The scenario given was the entire

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Ben Scott
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: > Ben brings up a good point about a > possible security risk, but motherboard manufactures haven't worried about > it much in the past. I believe it was Intel who crafted that design feature, not the mobo mfgs. So inaction on the part of the

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Michael ODonnell
On this busy morning I've only had time to glance at some docs for SVM (Secure Virtual Machine) support but it does appear that in some cases external hardware (in the form of a TPM - the dread Trusted Platform Module) can be involved in the prep and execution of the Secure Loader and, therefore,

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Lloyd Kvam
On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 11:25 -0400, Michael ODonnell wrote: > On this busy morning I've only had time to glance at some docs I did not want to eat up people's time with this thread. I've wasted far too much of my own time on this. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://dlslug.org/l

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Lloyd Kvam
On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 11:01 -0400, Ben Scott wrote: > But I will make this general observation: The processor does not > exist in a vacuum. A working computer is a system, of which the > processor is but one part. If one needs/wants virtualization but one > is shopping solely by processor, I woul

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Michael ODonnell
> I did not want to eat up people's time with this thread. This thread is interesting and something that I've been meaning to learn more about so I was pleased to have an excuse to dig an old CPU manual out of my desk midden. ___ gnhlug-discuss maili

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Darrell Michaud
Just to round out the thread.. As people have already stated, the intel VT optimizations are not required to support virtualization, or even hypervisors. Vmware ESX is an example of a decent hypervisor that does not require these CPU capabilities to be present. KVM on the other hand requires eithe

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Shawn O'Shea
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:13 PM, Darrell Michaud wrote: > Just to round out the thread.. > > As people have already stated, the intel VT optimizations are not required > to support virtualization, or even hypervisors. Vmware ESX is an example > of a decent hypervisor that does not require these CP

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Jerry Feldman
On 09/28/2009 01:49 PM, Lloyd Kvam wrote: > But shopping for virtualization in a laptop seems to be pretty hopeless. > I could not find any mention of virtualization in any of the laptop spec > pages. I tried to use the Dell sale support service. The Dell folks > supplied a laptop spec with an In

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Darrell Michaud
That's a good clarification. I thought it was important to stress that there are well-performing 32bit x86 guest virtualization hypervisors out there that do not require intel VT or AMD-V, such as VMware's ESX 3.5, ESXi 3.5, workstation products, and current versions of Sun's Virtualbox. For somet

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine support

2009-09-28 Thread Michael ODonnell
> There was a study published a couple years back that showed > enabling the VT instructions can result in lower performance Heh. The x86 instruction set offers some fancy instructions that are supposed to help you implement an OS by doing (in one swell foop) some fairly involved stuff like dum

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Jerry Feldman
I guess a couple of more things is what you want to use virtualization for. On my laptop it is almost purely for demo purposes, although I initially set it up to run some things that could not be done under Linux, even through WINE. Initially, I needed RealPlayer for my wife, but RealPlayer Superpa

OT: Looking for degausser/magnetic tape eraser

2009-09-28 Thread VirginSnow
This isn't Linux-specific, but I figured I'd try asking here... I'm looking for a degausser/magnetic tape eraser for erasing mini DV tapes. I've tried all the local stores (RadioShack, BestBuy, even a TV/VCR repair shop), as well as Allied Electronics and Digikey, but none of them seem to sell de

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Tom Buskey
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > I guess a couple of more things is what you want to use virtualization > for. On my laptop it is almost purely for demo purposes, although I > Definitely. For example, Sun has defined 4 different ways to do virtualization on SPARC Solaris.

Re: OT: Looking for degausser/magnetic tape eraser

2009-09-28 Thread Michael ODonnell
Seriously: http://www.unitednuclear.com/magnets.htm ...and you'll have some fun, if dangerous, toys to play with, too. I don't know that they're officially represented as being appropriate for your specific purpose but some of them are so dangerously powerful you can find pictures on the WW

Re: OT: Looking for degausser/magnetic tape eraser

2009-09-28 Thread John Abreau
I bought one of these in June of 2008 for $195. It was designed for VHS tapes, and to degauss a hard drive, you first have to unscrew and remove the metal plate on top of the hard drive and expose the drive platters. On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:57 PM, wrote: > This isn't Linux-specific, but I fi

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Alex Hewitt
Jerry Feldman wrote: > I guess a couple of more things is what you want to use virtualization > for. On my laptop it is almost purely for demo purposes, although I > initially set it up to run some things that could not be done under > Linux, even through WINE. Initially, I needed RealPlayer for my

Re: OT: Looking for degausser/magnetic tape eraser

2009-09-28 Thread Ben Scott
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 2:57 PM, wrote: > I'm looking for a degausser/magnetic tape eraser for erasing mini DV > tapes. http://www.google.com/search?q=mini+DV+degausser > The closest thing I > could find to what I need is a rare-earth magnet based "Erase-O-Matic" > Model 1 for a mere $400.00.

Re: Enabling Virtual Machine supportn of virtualization. (buying virtualization support)

2009-09-28 Thread Ben Scott
On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Lloyd Kvam wrote: > But shopping for virtualization in a laptop seems to be pretty hopeless. I wish I could say I was surprised. In general, I find most vendors are incompetent at the "consumer" level. To get real vendor support, you have to seek products whic