The per virtual CPU utilization statistic (UTIL) is shown through the long (–l) option of the ldm list command. The statistic is the percentage of time that the virtual CPU spent executing on behalf of the guest operating system. A virtual CPU is considered to be executing on behalf of the guest operating system except when it has been yielded to the hypervisor. If the guest operating system does not yield virtual CPUs to the hypervisor, the utilization of CPUs in the guest operating system will always show as 100%.
The utilization statistic reported for a logical domain is the average of the virtual CPU utilizations for the virtual CPUs in the domain. The normalized utilization statistic (NORM) is the percentage of time the virtual CPU spends executing on behalf of the guest OS. This value takes into account such operations as cycle skip. Normalized virtualization is only available when your system runs at least version 8.2.0 of the system firmware.
When PM does not perform cycle skip operations, 100% utilization equals 100% normalized utilization. When PM adjusts the cycle skip to four eighths, 100% utilization equals 50% utilization, which means that the CPU effectively has only half the possible number of cycles available. So, a fully utilized CPU has a 50% normalized utilization. Use the ldm list or ldm list -l command to show normalized utilization for both virtual CPUs and the guest OS.