Although I’m using ESXi for GPU passthrough instead of Linux/KVM, I’ve noticed a similar behavior that I wanted to ask about. Namely, that when creating a VM with multiple cores the default behavior is to assume that the user/admin wants 1 core per socket. This is really dumb from a Windows licensing perspective. In my case I naively installed Windows 10 Home into my VM and was seriously underwhelmed. That is until I realized that it only had one (functional) core. Microsoft being M$, they restricted Win10 Home to one socket, but numerous cores, and Windows could only ‘see’ the first virtual core in the first virtual socket.
Anyway, it was easily corrected once I figured it out. But I’ve also noticed this odd design choice in other hypervisors as well. What’s the deal?