Rebuilding my VirtualBox Server

My Tyan Tiger K8WE expired a little while ago so my home server environment was being hosted on an MSI K8N Master2 - which is OK but it doesn't support 2GB DIMMS very well so I was running with 6GB RAM rather than 12.

Tigers are a bit thin on the ground on UK eBay but I did score an Asus K8N-DL that allows me to use my 2GB DIMMS again. So I go to install OpenSUSE 11.4 and VirtualBox 4.1 which proves to be a slightly interesting experience. When running hosted virtaul machine environments I like window managers like compiz or the KDE wm which give have a desktop grid view. Then I can have one VM per desktop and zoom out to get a view of the whole VM constellation. Here are my findings:

• The K8N-DL boots into OpenSUSE without any problem from a cold, power-on state. However, warm boots and even cold boots without power cycling lock up hard during kernel startup. This is with BIOS 1010 which is the latest.
• If you only have one CPU present then the booting problem disappears.
• While swapping out CPU's, I tried mixing single and dual-core E-stepping Opterons. This works completely fine (provide you cold boot) if CPU 0 is the dual-core. Linux seems happy and the NUMA tables look sensible. There is even a certain logic since the board only has 2 DIMM slots for the second CPU.
• I use Conky as a system monitor and had problems with it stopping updates after a while. I discovered that if, I have apcupsd monitoring entries and the daemon isn't running because I haven't plugged the UPS serial cable in, then it works for a bit displaying "N/A" but then seizes up after a while. Commenting out the entries fixed this.
• Linux orders the drives on the NV sata controller in the opposite order to the BIOS just to mess with your mind while configuring things. OpenSUSE's installer gets GRUB and the MBR in the right places though.