Bhyve - EPT/Real Address Mode - Unrestricted Guest

[James Lodge]

>Hi James,

> Can someone please confirm that having EPT support in the CPU is not
> necessarily enough to run Bhyve. I have an Intel Xeon L5520 (Nehalem
> family) that supports EPT but when trying to run an VM, receive
  ...
> My understanding is that the L5520 does not have support for
> "Unrestricted Guest/Real Address Mode"  which was introduce with the
> release of the Westmere architecture.

>  Yes, that's correct.

> I assume its a non starter without the unrestricted guest feature.

 > Mostly. You'll only be able to run single vCPU FreeBSD guests since
>they boot directly into 64-bit mode: everything else (including multiple
>vCPU guests) requires either 16-bit support or 32-bit non-paged
>protected mode, both of which are only available on Intel with the
>'unrestricted guest' feature.

>later,

>Peter.


Hi Peter, 

Thank you for the clarification. It looks like I'll need to purchase a couple to Westmere X5650 CPU's that do have the 'unregistered guest' feature as I need to be able to running multi vcpu FreeBSD vms and Windows. 

Thank you again for your help. 

Regards
James Lodge