| 11 | | '''A''': Yes, we provide full support for Intel VT-x and experimental support for AMD SVM. However, we do not make use of these features by default. You have to enable it either globally or on a per VM basis. The reason is very simple: our x86 virtualization is very sophisticated and in most cases it provides significantly better performance than when relying on VT-x. Virtualization products that rely on VT-x are usually much less sophisticated and tuned. With VT-x, a special CPU environment has to be entered in order to execute guest code and whenever activity of the VMM is required, this environment has to be left and then entered again. This is painfully slow and will take some years until additional benefits of VT-x and SVM (such as nested paging) may outweigh the performance penalty. !VirtualBox will continue to support the latest CPU enhancements and already today, you benefit from VT-x when running guest operating systems such as OS/2 Warp which need rarely-used processor features. In general, with VT-x enabled much less virtualization code from !VirtualBox has to be executed which can result in a more reliable system in case there are problems. So if you run into an issue, we recommend to compare the results to a VT-x enabled VM. |
