bhyve and virtualbox on the same host using EPT

[mailinglists at debank.tv]

On 2013-08-07 11:06, Peter Grehan wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
>> Bhyve generates the following error after the bootloader screen:
>> 
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>> Booting...
>> 4 vCPUs requested but only 1 available
>> -----------------------------------------------------
> 
>  What this means is that the model of CPU that you have doesn't
> support the "unrestricted guest" feature, which allows a guest to run
> in 16-bit mode.
> 
>  bhyve boots FreeBSD directly into 64-bit mode on the main CPU, but
> secondary CPUs are started through a boostrap from 16-bit mode to
> 64-bit mode. There was a hack early on in bhyve to avoid this by
> starting the secondaries directly in 64-bit mode, but it was bhyve-
> and FreeBSD-specific and difficult to maintain. Given that there was
> only a small timeframe of CPUs that supported EPT but not unrestricted
> guest (early Nehalems), we decided to the 64-bit AP spinup.
> 
>  You can still run single vCPU guests though.
> 
>> The Virtualbox logs below show EPT in use:
> 
>  On the issue of running VBox and bhyve at the same time: that's not
> recommended and will probably result in a crash. To do this requires
> cooperation from hypervisors in that they will completely flush state
> any time they could be context-switched away to avoid the other
> hypervisor's state from colliding. This results in poor performance
> which is why it usually isn't done by default.
> 
>  I think we know how to fix this in bhyve, but aren't there yet.
> 
> later,
> 
> Peter.
> 
> 

Peter,

Thanks for your answer, this clears things up, I was under the 
impression that EPT support automatically included the "unrestricted 
guest" feature. Unfortunately I'll have to stick with Virtualbox as I 
need multiple CPU support for my vm's.

Thanks for the great software though, I'll be back running bHyve once I 
get my hands on a more capable machine!

Thanks,
Rob Evers