On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Tanstaafl <tansta...@libertytrek.org> wrote: > On 2011-05-31 1:31 PM, James wrote: >> The only thing I've read online that may be applicable is that there >> have been some issues with kernel panics when you give the guest OS >> more than 1 processor. It would suck badly if SMP didn't work well on >> vbox. > > My understanding is it is a general rule that you never give any VM more > than one processor, regardless of which vm hypervisor you are running... > > My platform is a Gentoo i7-980 Extreme processor so I have 12 CPUs (6 cores * 2 for hyperthreading)
In Virtualbox I'm running both Gentoo and Win 7 VMs, each allocated 4 processors. In Win 7 I have one app that uses everything it can find so when it's running all 4 processors are 100% utilized. In Linux I see the CPU usage at 33%. Win 7 is sluggish when this app is running as it hogs from the system In VMWare Player I'm running Win XP VMs with 2 processors. None of my apps in XP use more than 1 processor. XP itself is quite responsive even when these apps are using 1 of the 2 processors dedicated the the VM. I seldom run more than 1 app in any Windows VM as I don't trust Windows. I've not had any problems with any of these VMs that I'd associate with using multiple cores. And yes, I do own these Windows licenses. VMs keep that money useful until some day some Linux apps come along that do what these do for me in Windows. - Mark
