This issue was discussed a couple of months ago (July 2017) in the developers' mailing list. Start from this reply and work your way by clicking "Next message" if you want more information. I'll include the linked message here for the search engines to pick up:
Michal wrote:
Hans wrote:I just upgraded a vbox guest to 4.13, the good news is everything works fine, but one thing which I noticed, which would be nice to fix is this new error message:
[ 0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata; please update microcode to version: 0xb2 (or later)
This is on a Skylake host with no special settings done to the guest (I selected the Fedora 64 bit template when installing).
The message is harmless. It's triggered because VirtualBox currently does not expose the host CPU microcode revision to guest operating systems. I don't think we want to do that without fully understanding what sorts of assumptions operating systems might make when they see the actual revision.
At any rate, VirtualBox currently doesn't support TSC deadline timers so the message is simply noise.
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
Unfortunately, this bug doesn't seem to be as harmless as supposed.
Some time ago I tried to install Virtualbox 5 and later 6 on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS HOST on my laptop.
Ubuntu is the default system to boot after restart on a dual boot machine.
This installation gave many problems and didn't succeed (problems with compiling kernel-drivers, or so).
Worse: after restart the Ubuntu HOST didn't start up but gave the message "TSC_deadline disabled due to errata ...".
There was no way to restore the Ubuntu host to a working condition, as there was no command line available for
a repair task ...
Fortunately the (grub ?) bootmanager still allowed the Windows 10 partition to boot as an alternative.
Yeti13,
I honestly don't see how your host's general problems and this "TSC_deadline" one, have anything to do with a virtual machine. We've heard from a core developer that the message is a red herring, and we haven't seen yet a problem with a VM stemming out of this "error"...
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
I should have posted this error on the VirtualBox forum for a Linux hosts earlier, as it is more appropriate there. But still:
Several attempts to install VirtualBox 6 on a Ubuntu 18.04 HOST did fail. The last attempt seemed to have succeeded, after a new NEEDED kernel driver for VirtualBox had been compiled in Ubuntu. Restarting Ubuntu was necessary in order to let the new driver be installed.
After that this weird message appears during boot (your team explained the reason earlier on in this forum) but the boot process of the HOST stops.
Searching the web for an explanation, in this situation (early boot) only updating the BIOS/firmware was applicable, but it was already up to date. It is strange that Google did not find this somehow related forum post, which I only found recently by accident.
This is not a real problem, as I now have Ubuntu 18.04 running as a GUEST In Virtualbox 6.010 in Windows 10.
If, for some reason, the complete error-screen of the boot process (I need to make a real photo ...) would be usefull, I can of course send it in.
