ubuntu

Hardware virtualization (VMX) allows one to run guest OS inside your primary OS efficiently i.e. faster. Without hardware support, OS emulation crawls like snail in tar. In Linux, kernel support for VMX is called KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine). Ubuntu support for it was added in Feisty.

I wanted to run Windows XP guest inside Ubuntu Feisty Fawn host with my HP nx9320 laptop. The laptop has Intel Core 2 Duo CPU supporting VMX techonology.

This Wiki page and this thread were very helpful.

Enabling VMX was major pain. First results were harsh

$modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

$dmesg | grep kvm
[ 4790.548000] kvm: disabled by bios

In turned out that I had to enable VMX in bios. HP support page provides BIOS update.

Ok, I boot to Windows, run BIOS installer, reboot, go to BIOS and enable Virtualization under Device configuration, reboot to linux and modprobe again.

$modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

D'oh. I reboot again, go to BIOS, double check that virtualization is enabled and reboot to Linux.

$modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In this point, smoke was coming from my ears. I was already planning to write email to HP support that "your BIOS update really doesn't do anything and I will never buy anything from you."

Well. Luckily I still had a little patience to Google around. It turned out that you need to do "real hard reset" for laptop. This means powering off and taking battery away before VMX is enabled. Thanks for HP Business Support Forum users to telling out this information.

After power cut reboot, modprobe installed kvm-intel succesfully.