Is Virtualization Technology Enabled On My PC?

Interested in virtual machines? And you need to know if your PC can run them? Well, you are in the right place!

First the never-fails one:

lscpu

This command shows a lot of information about your PC, in fact, about your CPU architecture, displaying the number, model, family, and manufacturer ID of your CPU, together with the threads, cores, sockets, nodes and so on. You should search for the line that contains the Virtualization keyword (don’t worry, it’s easy to find).

Actually that’s it. That command never fails. But here are another options, because some times the unpredictable happens.

With the next one, you’ll get ‘vmx’ (Intel) or ‘smv’ (AMD) on the output. Hopefully colored.

egrep "(svm|vmx)" /proc/cpuinfo

If it doesn’t shows those keywords with colors, don’t worry, I got you covered:

egrep --color -i "svm|vmx" /proc/cpuinfo

Here, the last one. If nothing worked out, don’t lose hope! This one will do the job.

Some OS come with the cpu-checker package pre-installed. It may be not your case, so here’s how you can installit, quick and easy with

sudo apt-get install cpu-checker

And then, let the magic happens:

sudo kvm-ok

If you have virtualization enabled, you’ll see something like

INFO: /dev/kvm exists
KVM acceleration can be used

Otherwise:

INFO: Your CPU does not support KVM extensions
KVM acceleration can NOT be used

---

Well, that’s it for now. Any thought write it down in the comments. See you next time!