I have just installed a new TW KDE system on new hardware which is an MSI B450-A Pro MAX motherboard with a Ryzen 5 3400G processor. The install did not add a PAE kernel which is why (I assume) 64 bit guests are not allowed in Virtualbox, however trying to install this kernel is giving me grief as it wants to change so much on the system it is not workable. Now as afar as I an tell virtualization is supported and active in BIOS and was at install time. So what is the best way to get my 64bit guests working? Do I have to re-install TW? Also I’d like to understand why, if the PAE kernel is required, why it was not installed?
Yup,
That incorrect setting would cause the problem you describe, the other would be if you somehow installed a 32bit OS (on openSUSE, would be possible only by installing i586 TW).
In fact I had thought of something like this. I got hit by about the same issue on a co-workers system. She had issues with some software and upon already had tried quite a lot of ideas we both found via google I had the idea to just set up a few virtualized images (she had win10 on this system when purchased) and just use virtual box. As virtual box just refused to start the set up images it at least gave some useful information about virtualization not activated and instead of doin hardware virtuatlization as I had set it in the config only limited paravirtualization would be available.
As I had already quite some experience with VMs that day I knew what and where to look for - but actually accessing the UEFI was the tricky part. The system somehow was either that **** fast it slipped through two rapid key presses or was somehow set to ignore them. Luckly Win10 when installed in uefi mode as a trick: hold shift while click on reboot - this opens a menu where you can select “access uefi” and the system will reboot straight into it. The set password then was just a “quickly remove the cmos-battery” away. Sure, disconnecting that thing will reset all settings - but I set it to pretty good values anyway - so no matter what was set before.
Although virtualization is also quite common in the private consumer market I understand why many has it disabled by default:
not many consumers use it - it’s something more pro-sumer / enthusiasts level
I’m not sure but it may could lead to some security issues when some malware installs a vm in the background (although unless the code is really stupid it should detect that hardware virtualization is disabled and fallback to paravirtualization)
at least as far as I’m aware it’s not one of the advertised features but rather only mentioned in datasheets - like: “a customer can’T charge us if a feature not advertised doesn’T work” or some **** like this …
Since CPU virtualization extensions were invented, the option had always been disabled by default in the BIOS and had to be re-enabled with a BIOS upgrade.
Then, in the last 2 years I’ve twice run into newly purchased laptops with virtualization enabled by default in the BIOS.
