Too large resolution reported on Retina Macbook host

Postings relating to old VirtualBox pre-releases
Post Reply
putamierda
Posts: 1
Joined: 2. Jul 2015, 17:20

Too large resolution reported on Retina Macbook host

Post by putamierda »

I'm running VirtualBox 5 RC2 on OS X Yosemite (10.10.4).
The MacBook is 13.3" and has a resolution of 2560x1600.

VirtualBox 5 adds the option "Use Unscaled HiDPI Output" under Screen>Screen in the virtual machine's settings.
With this off (as with VirtualBox 4), the resolution reported to Linux guests is 1440x900. This is the resolution OS X simulates, but this causes blurriness in Linux.
With this on, the resolution reported to the Linux guest (NixOS) is 2880x1800, bigger than my native resolution, instead being that of a 15-inch MacBook.

xrandr reports the following on the guest:
Screen 0: minimum 64 x 64, current 2880 x 1800, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-0 connected primary 2880x1800+0+0 0mm x 0mm
2880x1800 60.00*+
1600x1200 60.00
1440x1050 60.00
1280x960 60.00
1024x768 60.00
800x600 60.00
640x480 60.00
Attachments
VBox.log
(123.91 KiB) Downloaded 40 times
tym0
Posts: 3
Joined: 8. Jul 2015, 15:42

Re: Too large resolution reported on Retina Macbook host

Post by tym0 »

The way VirtualBox does Hi-DPI is by doubling the resolution OS X is scaled at. So if you have your Mac setup at the scaled resolution "Looks like 1440 x 900" then the Hi-DPI resolution will be 2880x1800. If you want the native resolution you need your display settings to be at "Default" ("Looks like 1280 x 800"). To my knowledge there is no work-around that.
Post Reply