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I have two different computers.

The first one has an i7-6700 Skylake processor on an Asus z170-a motherboard running Windows 10 Professional 20H2 x64 The ark page for the processor is here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/fr/fr/ark/products/88196/intel-core-i76700-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-00-ghz.html

The second one has an i5-6400 Skylake processor on a Gigabyte z170-x Gaming 3 motherboard running Windows 10 Professional 21H1 x64. The ark page for this processor is here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/fr/fr/ark/products/88185/intel-core-i5-6400-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-30-ghz.html

Both processors are of the same generation and, as you can see in the ark pages, both have EPT (Extended Page Tables) support advertised.

Nevertheless, when I try to run Sysinternals' Coreinfo64.exe -v [1] on the i5-6400, I get:

HYPERVISOR: * Hypervisor is present (notice the star, here)
VMX : -
EPT : -
URG : -

On the i7-6700, I get:

HYPERVISOR: - Hypervisor is present (notice the caret, here)
VMX : *
EPT : *
URG : *

I have two questions:

What does HYPERVISOR: - mean, versus HYPERVISOR: * ? Especially since in both cases it indicates "Hypervisor is present"?

EPT does not seem to be available on the i5-6400. How can I enable it? In my BIOS, the only thing related that I can enable/disable is VT-d, and it is already enabled. The latest BIOS is installed.

(I also checked a i5-6300U Skylake laptop, which reports the same as my i5-6400 desktop)

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/coreinfo

Hennes
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Martin Frank
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1 Answers1

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From the Coreinfo webpage:

For each resource it shows a map of the OS-visible processors that correspond to the specified resources, with '*' representing the applicable processors.

So * can be assumed to mean "present" or "enabled".

When a hypervisor is enabled and running it will allocate VMX features and block other parts of the system from using them.

As a result

  1. your first dump is showing that the hypervisor is enabled, but the extensions are no longer present for use by other applications
  2. your second dump shows that the hypervisor is not enabled, and the extensions are available for use.

In order to use EPT on some other software, such as VirtualBox, you will need to disable HyperV, Windows Defender Core Isolation and potentially other Windows features such as the Windows Sandbox, WSL2, and the Virtual Machine Platform.

Mokubai
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