[libvirt] Is it possible to use more then 2 CPUs in the guest?

Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu
Thu Aug 6 11:59:19 UTC 2009


On 06/08/09 12:36, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 10:11:07AM +0200, Mirko Raasch wrote:
>
>> in my server i use an Intel Quad Core CPU and i want to use in one
>> WindowsXP guest all 4 cores.
>> The device manager shows four CPU (Qemu Virtual CPU version 0.10.5).
>> When i start prime95 or superpi, only 2 of them are in use. CPU-Z shows
>> also 2 Cores, instead of 4 like the device manager.
>
> I don't know what those apps are, but they sound broken to me. If the
> guest has been launched with 4 virtual CPus, the guest OS should be
> able to use them, regardless of what your host core/socket/thread cpu
> topology is. KVM/QEMU allow upto 16  virtual CPUs IIRC, and this is
> totally independant of how many physical CPUs you have.

As other people have already said, it's a Windows licensing thing where 
some versions of Windows are designed to only work on a limited number 
of physical CPU packages. So they will run 4-way on a quad core but not 
on four single core CPUs.

So it is seeing all the cores and reporting them in task manager but 
only allowing two to be used by programs.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/




More information about the libvir-list mailing list