EPT support

[jpuche]

Dear all,

I would like to know what intel processors have EPT (HAP - Hardware Nested Paging) support. I spent some time searching in the net but I found no clear results. I see that VirtualBox supports now EPT for amd (npt) processors and I guess also for intel processors, but I am unable to find what processors have that feature.
I read somewhere that Nehalem processors where supposed to provide that support, but the Q9xxx series are Nehalem (aren't they?) and I guess they do not have EPT integrated (virtualbox does not detect it for my Q9300). Somewhere people says that core i7 have it, so the question is: are core i7 the first intel processors with EPT???

Thanks for any help and best regards,

Javier.

[David_O_Intel1]

I've been given a contact to follow up with on this question. Thanks for your patience. (The staff member is out sick.)

[David_O_Intel1]

Here's the answer I received:

Q9300 is not Nehalem or Core i7, so it will not have EPT support.

New Nehalem desktop CPUs should have VT-x2 enabled (which contains EPT). However, thesoftware stack (Hypervisor)may not support it.I don't know any client hypervisor that issupporting it at this time. Intel is, of course, working with all the VMM providers to enable VT-x2 and expect most will support by year end. Contact your VMM provider for status info.

[paul_cayleyavanade_c]

Quoting - David Ott (Intel)

Here's the answer I received:

Q9300 is not Nehalem or Core i7, so it will not have EPT support.

New Nehalem desktop CPUs should have VT-x2 enabled (which contains EPT). However, thesoftware stack (Hypervisor)may not support it.I don't know any client hypervisor that issupporting it at this time. Intel is, of course, working with all the VMM providers to enable VT-x2 and expect most will support by year end. Contact your VMM provider for status info.

Windows Hyper-V V2 supports EPT: Enhanced processor support. You can now have up to 32 physical processor cores and second-Level Address Translation (SLAT) and CPU Core Parking. SLAT adds a second level of paging below the architectural x86/x64 paging tables in x86/x64 processors. It provides an indirection layer from virtual machine memory access to the physical memory access. In virtualization scenarios, hardware-based SLAT support improves performance. On Intel-based processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT) ....

All The Best,

Paul