Part II: VirtualBox is giving me friction about my AMD-V

This is an update to an earlier post.  In a previous post, I talked about an issue where after upgrading VirtualBox it was no longer able to run 64bit guests, on some motherboards with AMD-V capable cpus.

After digging a little more,  It seems that having the kernel modules kvm and kvm_amd loaded while running VirtualBox was causing the issue.  The presence of those two modules is causing VirtualBox to wrongly see svm as not enabled.

If you are not using kvm and kvm_amd for other things, you can blacklist those two modules to prevent them from loading.  Here is how you do that.  Create a new blacklist .conf file in the /etc/modprobe.d folder.  Then add a line to blacklist those two modules.

$ echo -e  "blacklist kvm\nblacklist kvm_amd" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-kvm.conf

Then reboot.

Before starting your guests after the reboot, first you’ll have to recompile your VirtualBox drivers.  You must do that as root.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv  setup
 * Stopping VirtualBox kernel module
 *  done.
 * Removing old VirtualBox netadp kernel module
 *  done.
 * Removing old VirtualBox netflt kernel module
 *  done.
 * Removing old VirtualBox kernel module
 *  done.
 * Recompiling VirtualBox kernel module
 *  done.
 * Starting VirtualBox kernel module
 *  done.

Your 64bit guests should start and run without issue as they were meant to do.   If not then make sure that you didn’t make a typo along the way.  Then verify that the two kvm modules are not loaded.  If you still can’t get it work, remember that the workaround from the previous post still works wells.