I often see others use VT-d as a justification to convince someone to get the higher end Retina MBP instead of the base model, but do Macs even support VT-d?
I often see others use VT-d as a justification to convince someone to get the higher end Retina MBP instead of the base model, but do Macs even support VT-d?
Yes they do. That is a reason why Fusion and Parallels work flawlessly.
Interesting. So, exactly how would one go about exposing a PCIe device (i.e.: a dedicated graphics card), for example, to a Guest OS in a virtual machine running on Parallels or Fusion?
The virtual machine is in charge of that. You'll need to use the hardware options. For instance, in VMWare you can allow the maximum number of cores the Guest OS can have access so. Same with amount of RAM and HDD space.
Yes they do. That is a reason why Fusion and Parallels work flawlessly.
I told you, that depends on the Virtual Software, I just cited some examples. Now, can they do it? I couldn't answer that.
But they also seem to work flawlessly on Macs such as mine (base 13" rMBP) that don't support VT-d.
VT-d is not the same thing as VT-x. I believe that you're getting the two of them mixed up.
No matter. I learned about Parallels Workstation Extreme tonight, so it's all good.
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) continues from the existing support for IA-32 (VT-x) and Itanium® processor (VT-i) virtualization adding new support for I/O-device virtualization. Intel VT-d can help end users improve security and reliability of the systems and also improve performance of I/O devices in virtualized environments.
Retina 13" CPU - i5 vs i7
If you scroll down, you will notice that contrary to the i5, the i7 supports VT-d
So if i understand that correctly, assuming you are running alot of VM/Parallels for Win8 or similar, the i7 would be the better choice, not only for it's higher base clock and larger cache.
Which brings me to my next question - is the current Retina able so support VT-d if powered by an i7 or are there other culprits like the EFI/OS support for this?
Finally - i wasn't able to verify whether VM-Ware Fusion even supports this feature. For Parellels you'd require Workstation Extreme as far as i can tell - does anyone have a link here or can tell from experience?
Someone above posted no, only Extreme edition which confirms my own findings.
Are there any performance comparisons between VT-d enabled VM and without? Or is this just marketing crap from Intel?
Edit - just saw that Extreme Edition only works for Windows hosts so unless im mistaken, all this is a moot point anyways due to lack of proper support.
VT-d also requires chipset support. I'm not sure if the mobile Intel 7 series chipset supports it, and I'm too lazy to look it up on Intel's site right now.
That's a pretty poor justification. There are a lot more valid reasons to justify the purchase than whether or not you can take advantage of VT-d.
As for me personally, I want to know because one interesting piece of software that I've started using recently is XenClient