VT-d or IOMMU -- any motherboard?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 08:31:13PM -0400, William Park wrote:
> What irritates me is that it's so much dependent on BIOS, and you won't
> know that until you buy the board and go into BIOS.  Eg. Asus has Q67
> and C206 motherboards (Sandy Bridge family) which supposed to have VT-d.
> Well, downloaded manuals say nothing about VT-d.
> 
> Intel recently came out with C202/C204/C206 chipset, Xeon E3-12xx cpu,
> and S1200BT motherboard.  They are Sandy Bridge family, which is
> cheaper.  But, they are available only in US, ie.  <newegg.com> has them
> but not <newegg.ca>.  Of course, 8GB ECC is not cheap.

It certainly seems that it comes down to having a BIOS that enables
it and sets up the ACPI tables correctly (apparently a big problem
for many vendors to do).  A couple of years ago it was the same with
supporting vt-x at all on teh CPU.  So many vendors disabled it in
the BIOS even though the CPU supported it because they hadn't tested
it and were worried about their crappy SMM code not working with it.
Sony was especially bad on their laptops.

Until windows starts to make good use of it, most vendors just don't
bother with it.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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