Discuss the VirtualBox 7.0.4 release

[scottgus1]

Am I to understand correctly that if I install 7.0.4 but run 6.1.40 Guest Additions my Win7 VM should work with 3D acceleration?

I think so, yes. 7.0 is new, so it will take some time to find bugs. 7.0's Guest Additions are causing a tad of trouble, and 6.1.40 GAs are possibly a good workaround. Taking a backup of the fully-shut-down VM folder will allow recovery from any possible glitches if you decide to downgrade the VM's GAs.

[okcrum]

7.0's Guest Additions are causing a tad of trouble, and 6.1.40 GAs are possibly a good workaround. Taking a backup of the fully-shut-down VM folder will allow recovery from any possible glitches if you decide to downgrade the VM's GAs.

YMMV with 6.1.40 GAs, as mine did. I found that removing previous 7.0.x GAs (sometimes twice) using Windows uninstall, then installing the 7.0.x update GA was what worked for me. I'm currently using the 7.0.5 test build, which seems to have sorted out these issues.

[Fnork]

Hi,

I use Windows 11 Home 64 as host OS, and a Debian Bookworm guest.

After upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 I had to disable "Virtual Machine Platform" and "Windows Hypervisor Platform", to be able to continue to use VirtualBox. I actually need those two windows settings because I also want to run WSL2 and Docker Desktop, which use them.
The reason I had to disable those two settings was that with those, Windows 11 claims the hypervisor functionality of the CPU for some invalid reason. Windows also created some API for software like VirtualBox to still be able to work, but I think the API is immature and VirtualBox was not ready yet, because starting with Windows 11, the combination kept crashing.

Now I upgraded to VirtualBox 7.0.4, but after that, my Debian VM is almost unusably slow.

Does anybody know if that is "just the new reality" in the use case with a Windows 11 Home host?
If it is not, is there some settings I can change which apparently VirtualBox did not do automatically pick up after I changed those Windows host OS settings?

[mpack]

Windows 11 claims the hypervisor functionality of the CPU for some invalid reason.

Invalid? Hyper-v needs that functionality, so that fact is hardly "invalid". Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning that (unlike type-2 hypervisors such as VirtualBox and VMware Workstation), it starts before the host OS and therefore can't co-exist with other hypervisors. I.e. the "host" Windows 10 is actually itself a VM, and there is no possibility of running a type 2 hypervisor which requires direct access to VT-x/AMD-v.

So yes, the slowness is a natural consequence of the above. Maybe in future the performance can be improved, i.e. once Microsoft stop changing the rules, but I doubt that it will ever have the performance of native VT-x/AMD-v.

There are scripts on Github that quickly flip a Win10 host config between Hyper-v enabled and not. I don't know if these will work on Win11, but I assume so - or at least assume that there are Win11 versions too.

[Fnork]

Yeah I phrased that the wrong way.

Let me try to explain better: Windows 11 /by default/ runs virtualised, with the excuse being it allows for some security features (marketed as "Core isolation") https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/win ... 521df09b78
Also, compelling options like WSL 2 and Docker Desktop require the Windows Feature "Virtual Machine Platform", which also make Windows 11 run on its own hypervisor.
So there is a clear drive for Windows 11 (both from a Microsoft and a user point of view) to always run on its own hypervisor and for users not wanting to disable that.

At the same time, there is the Windows feature "Windows Hypervisor Platform" which is meant for and marketed as an API to allow third-party software such as VirtualBox to still use virtualisation features while Windows 11 is already running on its own hypervisor. What I see though is that VirtualBox is unusably slow (not just slow, but unusably slow), even with "Windows Hypervisor Platform" enabled. VMWare player though is fast enough in this situation.

The above makes me wonder if VirtualBox 7 actually uses this new API or not.
If it does, and no more improvement is expected, then the usecase to ever use VirtualBox on Windows 11 and later becomes really thin.
If it does not, then the question is if and when VirtualBox will start using that API, and possibly becomes usable again (with "Virtual Machine Platform" and "Windows Hypervisor Platform" enabled).

[fth0]

VirtualBox 6.1 and 7.0 (in NEM) both use the Windows Hypervisor Platform API, as you can verify yourself in the VBox.log file. It is expected to be noticeably slower, but not unusably slow, but YMMV on the interpretation of that.

If you want us to take a look, start a VM from the Powered Off state, let it run for 10 minutes, then close the VM, preferably from within the guest OS, else using the Close button of the VM's window. Provide a (zipped) VBox.log file from that VM run.

[Garet Jax]

HI all,

I'm on VB 6.1.40 in this moment on all my machines.

I discovered the new release 7.0.4, but, until now, VB does not suggest to upgrade and checking new version it tells me that I have got the newest version.

Will it ever notify me of the new version?

Should I upgrade by hand?

Thank you very much!
Happy new year!

[fth0]

Will it ever notify me of the new version?

Only if you have configured the VirtualBox Manager to do so. See the settings under File > Preferences > Update.

On the question about "Should I upgrade?", you'll find different opinions: There are host setups where it works well and others where not, and the causes aren't really known yet.

[Harold Hare]

I'm also having the 3D Acceleration problem. I'm running 7.0.4 on OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 with a Windows 7 32-bit Guest. It all worked under 6.1.40. I have tried removing the 7.0.4 Guest Additions and reinstalling the 6.1.40 one, and also installing the test version 7.0.5 Guest Additions. The VM runs but does not support WDDM graphics. Is there a "setextradata" setting that I ought to be using?

[fth0]

Is there a "setextradata" setting that I ought to be using?

There is an extradata setting that lets VirtualBox 7.0.4 use the (now obsolete and unsupported) graphics implementation of VirtualBox 6.1.40 and that could be used as a workaround: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=107519#p528194.

[Harold Hare]

Is there a "setextradata" setting that I ought to be using?

There is an extradata setting that lets VirtualBox 7.0.4 use the (now obsolete and unsupported) graphics implementation of VirtualBox 6.1.40 and that could be used as a workaround: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=107519#p528194.

Thanks. I tried it but the VM crashed straight away. I've gone back to 7.0.5 which works, but without WDDM support. I suppose I'll just have to keep trying new releases until it gets fixed.

[Fnork]

VirtualBox 6.1 and 7.0 (in NEM) both use the Windows Hypervisor Platform API, as you can verify yourself in the VBox.log file. It is expected to be noticeably slower, but not unusably slow, but YMMV on the interpretation of that.

If you want us to take a look, start a VM from the Powered Off state, let it run for 10 minutes, then close the VM, preferably from within the guest OS, else using the Close button of the VM's window. Provide a (zipped) VBox.log file from that VM run.

Thanks for the reaction!

I attached log file as suggested.

It contains lines indicating NEM is in use.
It also contains a line "NEMR3Init: Snail execution mode is active!".

As an aside: In https://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/tru ... /NEMR3.cpp I find the following:

Code: Select all

#ifdef RT_OS_WINDOWS /* [color=#FF0000]The WHv* API is extremely slow at handling VM exits. The AppleHv and
                        KVM APIs are much faster, thus the different mode name[/color]. :-) */
                LogRel(("NEM:\n"
                        "NEM: NEMR3Init: Snail execution mode is active!\n"
                        "NEM: Note! VirtualBox is not able to run at its full potential in this execution mode.\n"
                        "NEM:       To see VirtualBox run at max speed you need to disable all Windows features\n"
                        "NEM:       making use of Hyper-V.  That is a moving target, so google how and carefully\n"
                        "NEM:       consider the consequences of disabling these features.\n"
                        "NEM:\n"));
#else
                LogRel(("NEM:\n"
                        "NEM: NEMR3Init: Turtle execution mode is active!\n"
                        "NEM: Note! VirtualBox is not able to run at its full potential in this execution mode.\n"
                        "NEM:\n"));
#endif

It suggests to me I'm out of luck for the moment. What you describe as YMMV in my case turns out to be unusably slow. To give an idea: even with normal mouse movement speed, in dropdown menus, the highlighted entries clearly lag behind the mouse cursor. Opening a new browser tab takes a quite noticeable a few hundred milliseconds. Actually any click action in the VM has this delay. Browser scrolling clearly stutters.

[fth0]

What you describe as YMMV in my case turns out to be unusably slow. [...]

Thanks for giving the examples to explain your POV, understood. A few hundred milliseconds is right in the subjective area I've been hinting at. In the past, other users reported delays of multiple seconds in menu item highlighting, that's when it gets unusably for most people (except for use cases where for example watching a running application takes the majority of the time).

Other than that, the VBox_2023-01-01_vm99_WHP_cleaned.log file indicates that the installation of the VirtualBox Guest Additions (GA) were only partially successful:

00:00:03.181737 VirtualBox VM 7.0.4 r154605 win.amd64 (Nov 16 2022 15:33:13) release log
00:00:25.531773 VMMDev: Guest Log: vboxguest: host-version: 7.0.4r154605 0x8000000f
00:00:25.531866 VMMDev: Guest Additions information report: Version 6.0.0 r127566 '6.0.0'
00:00:27.071171 VMMDev: Guest Log: 10:11:05.476497 main     VBoxService 7.0.4 r154605 (verbosity: 0) linux.amd64 (Nov 16 2022 17:25:52) release log

Please repeat the GA installation and watch out for error messages in the terminal. In the past, some users ignored the reported prerequisite of installing the Linux kernel sources beforehand.

Please report back if correct installation of the GA influences the performance or not.

[Garet Jax]

Will it ever notify me of the new version?

Only if you have configured the VirtualBox Manager to do so. See the settings under File > Preferences > Update.

On the question about "Should I upgrade?", you'll find different opinions: There are host setups where it works well and others where not, and the causes aren't really known yet.

Thank you very much for your answer.
I discover the set up for download new upgrades.

I decided to leave on "stable version".
I will upgrade when it will be stable.

Thank you!

[agilis]

From my brief use of v7.0.4, I was not a fan of the VirtualBox pop-up bar that slides in from the bottom or top of the screen not completely dissappearing when you set the bar to not be pinned. I was not able to use 7.0.4 release for that long due to the following occuring running Ubuntu Guest and Windows Host.

Broken Display Arrangement Configuration w/ VirtualBox Additions 7.0.4.
Ticket for the issue I submitted. https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/21403