Arch Linux, Guest Additions and xorg 1.20 : Moving windows around is sluggish.

[hotjava1231]

Recent update from xorg 1.19 to 1.20 broke something at Guest Additions. Now moving windows around is very slow and playing videos is very sluggish.

Enabling 3D acceleration and using unagi (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unagi/) as compositor manager somewhat alleviates the problem but video playing performance isn't what it used to be. Also browsing web sites is slow.

I'm running development version of VirtualBox VM 5.2.97 r122781. Release version of VirtualBox 5.2.12 have same problem.

Guest OS is rolling distro Arch and I'm using LXDE desktop environment. Host OS is Arch and with LXDE, too.

[Shookit]

I just wanted to chime in to confirm that xorg 1.20 on Arch absolutely hammered my UI performance (especially text scrolling). Rolling back to 1.19 fixed everything.

[mpack]

00:00:01.805303 OpenGL Info: Render SPU: Opening display :0.0
00:00:01.890980 OpenGL Info: Render SPU: Opening display :0.0
00:00:01.982340 OpenGL Info: Render SPU: GL_VENDOR: X.Org
00:00:01.982370 OpenGL Info: Render SPU: GL_RENDERER: AMD RS780 (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.16.12-1-ARCH, LLVM 7.0.0)
00:00:01.982373 OpenGL Info: Render SPU: GL_VERSION: 3.0 Mesa 18.2.0-devel (git-38a8c5903b)

That looks like the host is using software OpenGL rendering, right? In which case sluggish UI performance is to be expected IMO.

Try turning 3D acceleration off, and/or reduce the display size. Investigate why you don't have hardware OpenGL.

And only a dual core host too, so not ideal. Still, you can try giving the guest 2 cores, though that will mean that the guest has the ability to bog down the host.

[hotjava1231]

No, host is using hardware 3D acceleration correctly. I can play few 3D games quite flawlessly (decent FPS) even thought my video card is embedded with the motherboard (AMD Radeon HD 3300).

It seems that with VirtualBox VM 5.2.13 r122890 and with VBoxGuestAdditions_5.2.13-122825.iso this bug is fixed. I can no longer see sluggish movement when moving around windows.

[hotjava1231]

Nope. It isn't solved. I need to enable 3D acceleration in the settings to get smooth window movement. Previously there weren't need for this option to be enabled.

[socratis]

I need to enable 3D acceleration in the settings to get smooth window movement. Previously there weren't need for this option to be enabled.

You can 1) go to the previous state, or 2) enable 3D acceleration. Things move forward I'm afraid, it's the name of the game...

[hotjava1231]

Yeah, it looks like that I need to adapt. But it is strange that xorg 1.19 didn't need 3D acceleration to be activated to get smooth window movement. Oh, well..

[Evilo]

You can have smooth movement without 3D acceleration with the following Xorg configuration file: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-vbox.conf

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
    Identifier "vbox"
    Driver      "modesetting"
    Option      "AccelMethod"      "none"
EndSection

Otherwise:

1. With 3D acceleration: 2D acceleration via glamor fail (because vbox opengl is not yet complete) and you have no 2D acceleration at all, which is good.
2. Without 3D acceleration: 2D acceleration via glamor succeed. But then glamor use software openlgl. This results with 2D being "accelerated" via software openGL. This is much worse that no 2D acceleration at all.

The file make sure that 2) does not happen by disabling glamor. If you do not know what glamor is, just google (it is 2D acceleration via openGL). Note that using such file is important if you can't enable 3D acceleration (that happen with some host GPU).