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

LigH

Member
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?
 
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.
 
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.
 
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Well, that's indeed a paradox!
And what says the "Secure Virtual Machine" CPU feature now?
 
Then either the BIOS switch doesn't work as expected or some other virtual machine is blocking this feature (claiming for itself).
 
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.
 
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