Bhyve on a Core i7-920

[Peter Grehan]

Hi Brando,

> ​Howdy folks, i have encountered a strange issue when i was trying to
> run CentOS 6.5 with bhyve on a server with 11.0-CURRENT FreeBSD
> Installed:
>
> VM unrestricted guest capability required Error in initializing VM
>
> the machine has 48GB of ram, and the cpu is a i7 920 as stated in the
> subject of this email. It has the instructions required to run bhyve
> ( VMX and POPCNT, as they appear in the dmesg log and in the Intel's
> Ark:
> http://ark.intel.com/products/37147/Intel-Core-i7-920-Processor-8M-Cache-2_66-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI?q=core%20i7-920
> ).
>
> Is there something wrong with this CPU?

  The 920 aka 'Bloomfield' is a first-generation Nehalem:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core#Core_i7

  That particular model doesn't have support for 16-bit real mode/32-bit 
protected/unpaged mode (aka "flat"). This is required for MP support for 
FreeBSD, or Linux support, since grub starts Linux in 32-bit flat mode.

  The VT-x feature that enables supports for this is known as 
'unrestricted guest', and was introduced in the Westmere microarch.

  It *may* be possible to get Linux working with grub-bhyve by adding 
support to start it directly in 64-bit mode, but it would be UP only.

later,

Peter.