From owner-freebsd-virtualization@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 18 19:44:39 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0649F8C1 for ; Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:44:39 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dweimer@dweimer.net) Received: from webmail.dweimer.net (24-240-198-187.static.stls.mo.charter.com [24.240.198.187]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CE702358 for ; Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:44:38 +0000 (UTC) Received: from www.dweimer.net (webmail.dweimer.local [192.168.5.2]) by webmail.dweimer.net (8.14.5/8.14.5) with ESMTP id r6IJib6Q079966 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 bits=256 verify=NO) for ; Thu, 18 Jul 2013 14:44:37 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dweimer@dweimer.net) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 14:44:37 -0500 From: dweimer To: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org Subject: Multiple CPUs in VirtualBox Guest still limited to one Host CPU core. Organization: dweimer.net Mail-Reply-To: dweimer@dweimer.net Message-ID: <3a9b9ee95327316dfe472f8816d2b7f1@dweimer.net> X-Sender: dweimer@dweimer.net User-Agent: Roundcube Webmail/0.8.1 X-BeenThere: freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list Reply-To: dweimer@dweimer.net List-Id: "Discussion of various virtualization techniques FreeBSD supports." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 19:44:39 -0000 I have been running VirtualBox in headless mode for a while on my home server. Its just running a single VM with Windows 2011 HomeServer (windows 2008 R2 based) as a file server I never did notice as there is very little CPU load that even though the guest is configured with 2 CPUs the load is never on more than 1 core of the 6 core AMD processor. I only noticed this after being happy with performance and stability of this setup, I migrated my laptop over to FreeBSD with VirtualBox to run Windows 8 in a VM, (yes I still have to run Windows for some things at work) however now that I am actually trying to do some interactive work in the VM I noticed it was a bit sluggish. And this is when I discovered that the Intel Core i7 QUAD core CPU was cranking away on one core while the others were sitting idle. I had configured the VM with 4 CPUS to match those of the host, am I missing some setting? Or is VirtualBox limited to one thread when running on a FreeBSD host. FreeBSD is running 9.1p4 compiled from source using Clang with virtualbox-ose-4.2.16_2 installed from ports, with the following options set. # This file is auto-generated by 'make config'. # Options for virtualbox-ose-4.2.16_2 _OPTIONS_READ=virtualbox-ose-4.2.16_2 _FILE_COMPLETE_OPTIONS_LIST=DBUS DEBUG GUESTADDITIONS NLS PULSEAUDIO QT4 UDPTUNNEL VDE VNC WEBSERVICE X11 OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=DBUS OPTIONS_FILE_UNSET+=DEBUG OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=GUESTADDITIONS OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=NLS OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=PULSEAUDIO OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=QT4 OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=UDPTUNNEL OPTIONS_FILE_UNSET+=VDE OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=VNC OPTIONS_FILE_UNSET+=WEBSERVICE OPTIONS_FILE_SET+=X11 -- Thanks, Dean E. Weimer http://www.dweimer.net/