Quantcast
Channel: VMware Communities: Message List
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 258290

Re: Does Intel Core i3-8300 (or i3-8100) support "VMX Unrestricted Guest"?

$
0
0

There is no way to identify from the Intel ARK site whether the VMX Unrestricted Guest feature is available. Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) is different from VMX Unrestricted Guest.

 

VMX Unrestricted Guest requires Extended Page Table (EPT). But presence of EPT for Nehalem and older CPUs does not mean they have EPT. VMX Unrestricted Guest has been available starting with Westmere CPU (2010) and newer. There are a few exceptions with Pentium N and Atom CPUs launched after 2010 that does not have EPT.

 

I don't see a lot of vmware.log files with i3 CPUs here in this community forum. I have seen vmware.log with Sandy Bridge i3 mobile CPU and it has the VMX Unrestricted Guest feature.

 

vmx| I125: hostCPUID codename: Sandy Bridge

vmx| I125: hostCPUID name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2350M CPU @ 2.30GHz

vmx| I125: Common: MSR      0x485 =         0x100401e5

vmx| I125:   IA-32e mode guest                        {0,1}

vmx| I125:   Unrestricted guest                       {0,1}

 

MSR 0x485 bit 5 value of 1 indicates VMX Unrestricted Guest is available. In this case hexadecimal e5 = binary 1110-0101.

 

I have seen vmware.log with Pentium G4560 (Kaby Lake) and it has it, too.

 

https://ark.intel.com/compare/126688,129942

 

Going by the i3 Sandy Bridge mobile and the Kaby Lake Pentium, it is very likely that i3-8100 or i3-8300 CPUs has the VMX Unrestricted Guest feature.

 

However, there is also a small risk that if VMware Workstation 14.x does not recognise the Family/Model/Stepping of a relatively new CPU, advanced virtualisation features such as virtualised performance counters will not work. This happened with 12.5.x with Kaby Lake CPUs. But if you don't need virtualised performance counters enabled in your VM, it should be fine to go with the i3-8300 launched Q2 2018. The symptom that the Family/Model/Stepping is not recognised would be it shows codename as Pentium in the vmware.log.

 

vmx| I125: hostCPUID codename: Pentium Core -- Unknown codename

vmx| I125: guest vs. host CPUID guest codename: Pentium Core -- Unknown codename


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 258290

Trending Articles



<script src="https://jsc.adskeeper.com/r/s/rssing.com.1596347.js" async> </script>