Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Discussions about using Solaris guests in VirtualBox.
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rtobyr
Posts: 1
Joined: 30. Mar 2011, 02:28
Primary OS: Mac OS X Leopard
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: Solaris 11 Express

Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Post by rtobyr »

Yes, I have searched, and this has been happening for so long with so many host OS's & processors & VB versions that I cannot find a solution that works.

VirtualBox Version: 4.0.4
Host OS: Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) (10.6.whatever the latest update number is)
Host Hardware: Core 2 Duo/4 GB RAM (Macbook Pro 13" 2010)
Guest OS: Solaris Express 11 32 bit (installed from Live CD)
Guest RAM: 1 GB
VT-x: Yes
Nested Paging: Yes
IO APIC: No
PAE/NX: No
VirtualBox Tools installed on guest: Yes

So as sexy as it is, Solaris Express 11 is unbearably slow in VirtualBox. It frequently uses > 50% of my CPU. Among the solutions that I've tried are disabling audio support in the VB settings and editing the menu.lst file. When I said that it's sexy, I mean it. The improvements from 10 => 11 make it a viable desktop OS. I want to get comfortable enough to use it as one, but I can't tolerate practicing with it as slow as it is on VirtualBox.

Thanks,
Toby

PS: Why is Oracle/Sun OpenOffice not available in the package manager of Oracle/Sun Solaris?
Perryg
Site Moderator
Posts: 34369
Joined: 6. Sep 2008, 22:55
Primary OS: Linux other
VBox Version: OSE self-compiled
Guest OSses: *NIX

Re: Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Post by Perryg »

It works fine for me. Boot takes a bit longer. Give it more ram to help the sluggishness.
Install as 64-bit helps too if your machine supports hardware-v.
Ask Oracle about the missing open office.
shawbelaire
Posts: 4
Joined: 27. Jul 2009, 16:02
Primary OS: OpenSolaris 11
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: xp

Re: Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Post by shawbelaire »

Just to second this I had 8G memory and it gets so slow that I have to click the guest window shut and reboot the guest. Can't even type in vi so slow.........
wahmed
Posts: 2
Joined: 8. Mar 2010, 00:48
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: CentOS 5.4

Re: Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Post by wahmed »

Same here. Extermely sluggish and very high cpu utilization. This is using VBox 4.04 on OSX 10.6.x. Even the installation was extermely slow and i thought that things would improve after install but no luck.

Same install and then boot and everthing else, lightening fast on VMWare Fusion on the same machine and disk. To give you an idea the install with VBox took more than one hour. Same install with VMWare 5 min.

Soemthing is terribly wrong either with our configuration or VBox or more so with the combo of S11 and VBox. Maybe VBox tools is needed if there is such a beast for S11.
Ramshankar
Oracle Corporation
Posts: 793
Joined: 7. Jan 2008, 16:17

Re: Solaris Express 11 Guest is Slow (search fail)

Post by Ramshankar »

I'd suggest giving 4.0.8 a try, especially since:
Changelog:
* Mac OS X hosts: fixed incompatibility with recent Mac OS X versions in 64-bit mode (bug #8474)
...
Oracle Corp.
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