(Solved) Ryzen 7, MSI X470: SVM enabled in BIOS, yet AMD-V disabled?

[LigH]

I have an MSI X470 GAMING PLUS MAX (MS-7B79) with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor.

In the OC area of the BIOS I can inspect the CPU features. The BIOS reports that Secure Virtual Machine is available. There is no option to disable it manually.

HWiNFO64 v7.26-4800 reports

• as CPU feature: Secure Virtual Machine – Available
• as Mainboard / SMBIOS DMI / BIOS feature: Virtual Machine: – Not available

The HWiNFO summary window shows "AMD-V" in red, despite SVM being enabled in the BIOS. VirtualBox 6.1, which requires hardware virtualization, does not offer to select multiple virtual CPU cores for a guest OS.

Searching the web, I cannot find any other recommendation than enabling the SVM in the BIOS to enable virtualization (and not to enable HyperV in Windows, which is disabled). So what is missing?

 

[Martin]

Information in SMBIOS DMI might not always be reliable as it depends on how well the BIOS supports this.
But AMD-V in red (or grey) in the summary despite enabling in BIOS might also happen if there's an existing virtualization enabled. Such (as Hyper-V) can mask presence of this feature.

 

[LigH]

I looked again ... had to switch to Expert mode [F7] in the BIOS OC settings. Here I found a switch for the SVM. And now the paradox...

It was disabled. I enabled it. Now HWiNFO displays AMD-V on the summary page grayed out. And BOINC complains that my CPU does not support the instructions required for VirtualBox tasks. But when I try to create a VM in VirtualBox, I can now move the slider to increase the number of virtual CPU cores.

The place where I looked before was just the CPU features summary. When you see SVM available here, it just means: The CPU would support it if you enable it.

Now I found an actual switch to enable or disable it. But its result baffles me.

 

[Martin]

Well, that's indeed a paradox!
And what says the "Secure Virtual Machine" CPU feature now?

 

[LigH]

It also displayed "Not available".

 

[Martin]

Then either the BIOS switch doesn't work as expected or some other virtual machine is blocking this feature (claiming for itself).

 

[LigH]

Yes, I noticed that HWiNFO warns about Hyper-V being in use. I wonder how to discover which process uses it... But it is disabled as a Windows component.

 

[Martin]

Check Memory Integrity / Core isolation setting.

 

[LigH]

It should be solved now, by running this in an Admin console:

bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off