Todd said:
Hi All,
I am running an XP-Pro-sp3 guest with KVM.
I told it six cores (I have eight total). Inside
the guest, the task manager says I have two.
Is there some sequence I have to follow? 1, 2,
4, 8? Is six a dirty number of cores?
Many thanks,
-T
The CPU license of each OS, has its own conditions.
In Win2K, licensing was by "cores". You could have two cores total.
If I had bought a Q6600 quad core, and run Win2K on it, only
two of the four cores would be recognized.
In WinXP, licensing is by "sockets". Pro is licensed for two sockets.
If I were to purchase a modern server motherboard, with two sockets,
and a couple $4000 10 core processors, I can have up to 20 cores
running in WinXP Pro, because it's socket based.
You would need to figure out, how VirtualBox is reporting
these cores to the guest OS, to understand what is displaying
in Task Manager.
I think WinXP home is one socket, while WinXP Pro is two sockets.
Those are the limits.
You could try booting a Linux LiveCD in the VirtualBox window,
and see via "dmesg" how many processors or cores are reported.
The report there still might not be detailed enough, but I don't
know of something equivalent in Windows you can do. I don't think
Device Manager particularly cares.
I suppose in your Windows guest OS, you could install the
Intel Processor Identification Utility and see what it reports.
That ought to show a pretty mangled declaration, as virtual
machines don't aim for consistency in the information they
present. A VM might report to the OS, that the machine is a
Pentium 3, when in fact it bears no such resemblance. And
at the same time, be reporting that SSE4 was supported.
The combined info, can be very confusing, for software that
cares about the details.
http://www.intel.com/support/processors/tools/piu/sb/cs-015472.htm
I don't know if AMD has a utility like that. I'm assuming based
on your core counts, the physical hardware is Intel.
Paul
