PAE always exposed to VM regardless of checkbox state

[Ivan Drucker]

On a Mac OS X host, using VirtualBox 4.1.8, PAE appears to always be available to the VM, even if the checkbox in Settings->System->Processor is unchecked.

By contrast, on a Windows host using VirtualBox 4.1.8, PAE is not available to the VM if the checkbox is unchecked.

One way to reproduce:
Use the Mac OS X version of VirtualBox 4.1.8
Uncheck PAE in Settings->System->Processor
Start up VM from Ubuntu 11.10 Server 32-bit edition CD
Press return (four times) until asked about detecting the keyboard layout
Press ESC, and choose to execute a shell
Type: grep -i PAE /proc/cpuinfo

Expected behavior would be no output other than another prompt. (This is how the Windows version behaves.) Actual behavior is that a line of CPU attributes is presented with pae among them, same as if the checkbox were checked.

Also, on a Mac OS X host with the checkbox unchecked, the pae version of the Linux kernel will still be installed, whereas that's not true on a Windows host.

[Ivan Drucker]

Forgot to mention: The host computer where this was seen is a MacBook Air 2011 Core i7, 4 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.7.2.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.