[GTALUG] VM Support in Linux

[Giles Orr]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 15:45, William Witteman via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> I am poking around in Android development, and I have run into a snag
> as my machine is pretty old, and doesn't have, or doesn't have
> enabled, some virtual machine features.  Specifically:
>
> > To use VM acceleration on Linux, your computer must also meet these requirements:
> >
> > For Intel processors: Support for Virtualization Technology (VT-x), Intel EM64T (Intel 64)
> > features, and Execute Disable (XD) Bit functionality enabled.
> > For AMD processors: Support for AMD Virtualization (AMD-V).
>
> I am not at all sure that my machine will do this - if I was looking
> for a new machine, are there any caveats, warnings, red flags to watch
> for?  I'd prefer not to have to spend a ton of time/money thinking
> about my hardware - I'd like it to run Debian with as little messing
> about as possible.

I'm not sure if you were asking about the current machine at all, and
I admit this is straight-up DuckDuckGo searching, but this seems to be
a very good article about how to determine if your current machine
supports the features you're interested in:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-xen-vmware-kvm-intel-vt-amd-v-support/

What I've always been less clear about is: what would the above tell
you if your machine supported VT-x _but_ VT-x was turned off in the
BIOS?

NOT an expert on the "new machine" question ... but I _think_ almost
anything new would have very good VM support?  I assume someone else
more knowledgeable will weigh in on that.  The one feature you really
want if you're tinkering with VMs much is MEMORY.  Get as much as you
can afford.  Most machines these days have 8G, and this is workable if
you're only running one or two VMs and not heavily taxing the base
machine ... but more is most definitely better.  You'll probably be
needing hard drive space as well - if you have multiple VM images,
they'll eat into your storage even when you're not running them.  This
isn't as important as memory, just don't go with the machine with the
really tiny SSD: get the mid-sized (or larger) SSD.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com