Wyse 3040 BIOS Virtualisation setting and performance boost with Linux

Hi, I have a couple of Wyse 3040 machines I purchased to run as headless linux machines for running boinc science projects on. I installed basic headless debian + ssh, and they have plenty of memory for what I need.

I run world community grid mapping cancer markers projects, and I set this up and it's been running fine.

I noticed that identical machines , node 1 & 2, that one was much faster than the other. WCG Mapping Cancer markers is a CPU intensive task, using a core at 100%, so the machines can run 4 of these at the same4 time, with temperature peaking around 57 degrees C.

Now one would take around 22 hours to complete a piece of work , while the other only 6 !

I double check the machines, both the same *except* the faster machine had Virtualisation enabled in the BIOS, whereas the slower didn't. SI enabled it on the slower machine and it returns result now circa 6 hours.


Now the thing that's puzzling is that WCG MCM does not use virtualisation. Some boinc projects do, but neither WCG or another one (Gaia@home) do, and gaia also showed comparable performance improvements.

So this suggests that the BIOS virtualisation setting does more than simply enable a VM to directly access the hardware ?

The BIOS version is 1.2.5