Steve,

bring that notebook back to the shop and purchase some adequate one. Made by some other manufacturer.

>>The official Sony line is that VT "Is not supported" (a horrible phrase that!) but there is no explanation to support that statement.

Well, obviously they don't want to support it \_on your model_. Just marketing trick... They'd preinstalled Vista Home on it, right? It means, your notebook is a consumer product. And consumers do not need VT.

>>I am sure that there must be a BIOS somewhere that is not locked down by the manufacturer that will enabe me to get to those settings.

Sure there could be the one. But you'll never get it. Unfortunately. They won't give it to you.

Hi, I cant get the link to work, forbidden!!

Perfect, thanks.

>>You might just want to reconsider your Sony purchase, and go with a company that actually cares about their customers and their products.

Rob, I would assign 1000 points to you for this sentence only

The feature control MSR (MSR 0x3a) has two bits of interest for VT: the VMXON enable bit (bit 2) and the lock bit (bit 0).  If the lock bit is clear, the contents of the MSR can be changed by the wrmsr instruction.  If the lock bit is set, the contents of the MSR cannot be changed, except by cycling power to the CPU, which resets the MSR to 0.

For VT to work, both of these bits must be set.



A BIOS that explicitly disables VT will leave the VMXON enable bit clear and set the lock bit. If your BIOS does this, your only recourse is to change the behavior of the BIOS. However, some BIOSes may just leave the MSR at its power-on value of 0. In this state, the MSR can still be changed by privileged (CPL 0) software (e.g. a kernel module).



Note that on a multiprocessor/multicore system, each core has its own feature control MSR, and the two bits must be set on all processors where you want to use VT. Some BIOSes only set the bits on one core. To further complicate matters, the MSR has to be set again each time the system awakens from deep sleep (S4), since the processor loses power in that state. Some BIOSes fail to set the MSR when awakening from S4.

An unofficial kernel module that handles all of this is available for Mac OS.  Linux or Windows users would have to write their own kernel module at this time.  I understand that the Windows module is pretty straightforward, but that a general Linux solution is complicated by the fact that the Linux power management APIs keep changing.

Ultimately, this is likely to be addressed internally in some future release of Workstation.

I ran the diagnostic  and all I received was "VT is disabled in the feature control MSR".  I got this for each of the two cores.  But there was no indication if the MSR was locked or not. There were a couple of screens that flashed by without any pause,  not sure if those told the tale on the MSR lock or not.  Can you offer any insight?

Thanks,

Gary

P.S. Assuming the MSR is not locked how would one go about finding the privilege level software to enable VT?

That tool could be more informative.  It reports only

bit settings that preclude the use of VT.  Therefore,

it reports when VT is disabled in the feature control

MSR or when the feature control MSR is unlocked.  The

messages appear adjacent to each other, so if you saw

one, you would have seen them both.  If it said

nothing about the lock bit, then the lock bit is

set.

 

In short, you are at the mercy of your system vendor

to provide you with a BIOS that allows you to enable

VT.

I ran it again and only saw the one message for each core.  There was nothing about the lock status at all.  I am a bit confused by "messages appear adjacent to each other, so if you saw one, you would have seen them both".  By adjacent do you mean one after the other or literally one next to the other? And are you talking about the two cores, or the two status indications, ie the VT bit and the MSR lock status?

I guess from the last sentence about the lock bit, that the app only reports if the lock bit is NOT set.

Thanks,

Gary