VMs take a long time to start on VB 7

[jvidal]

Hi!

I just updated to VB 7 and now whenever I click on "start VM", to start a VM, nothing happens for about 5-10 seconds until the VM window appears and starts running. This also sort of happened in VB 6, but it was somewhat faster.
I must add, though that this only affects the starting of the VMs, after they start, they run at normal speed.

I hope something can be done about this, it is kind of annoying.

[mpack]

Sounds like you have Hyper-v enabled on the host.

See HMR3Init: Attempting fall back to NEM (Hyper-V is active).

[jvidal]

Hi!

nope, I don't have it enabled. I enabled it once, a long time ago, but since it created issues with other virualization solutions, I disabled it.
(Unless, it got enabled by itself or something)

Edit: Come to think of it, I never enabled it, I did it on another computer, not on this one...
The issue is that there's a long delay between pressing the "Start" button and the VM Window appearing, the rest goes fine. This doesn't happen with other VM software, like VMWare, for example, machines start immediately with that one.

[scottgus1]

A VM log would show us if Hyper-V is enabled, and the green turtle in the VM window's status bar will show you. No green turtle, no host Hyper-V.

The delay is for hardening checks, and the time taken depends on the processing and data speeds of your PC. My workstation is faster on the hardening checks than my laptop. The delay being longer for 7 vs 6.1 may be for different hardening algorithms, or it may be a bug or three. Please post this in Discuss the VirtualBox 7.0.0 release so the devs can see it.

[jvidal]

FWIW, I've never seen the green turtle icon. I'll check again.

Edit: confirmed, no green turtle. I see the normal icon (the chip with the "v" over it).
execution engine: VT-x / AMD-V
nested paging: active
restriction-less execution: active
execution limit: 100
paravirtualization interface: none

Like I said, the machine runs at normal speed, for example, starting windows 3.1 on a DOS VM takes about 2 seconds. The problem is that it can take anything from 5 to 20 seconds for the VM window to appear after pressing the start button.

[HonDen]

Same problem here. Reproducible slowdown in every version newer than 6.1.34.

[trongod05]

Sounds like you have Hyper-v enabled on the host.

I guess they still haven't figured out how to get Virtualbox working along side Hyper-V? I've been using Vmware Workstation because of this.

[mpack]

I guess they still haven't figured out how to get Virtualbox working along side Hyper-V?

At this stage it's nearly impossible, as MS keep changing things. There would need to be a couple of years of stability before it would be IMO worth trying to optimize VirtualBox for the Hyper-v platform. In the meantime I don't enable Hyper-v on my PCs. The only thing I might have wanted it for was to run WSL2, but it turns out that WSL2 doesn't work very well for what I need and a VBox Linux VM works better anyway (more intuitively).

[AndyCot]

WSL2 Linux works very well on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 for all, but one corner case for me.

[mpack]

I said that it doesn't work for me, not that it doesn't work.

[AndyCot]

I said WSl2 works " for me."

[mpack]

This discussion is off topic. Let it end there please.

[jvidal]

You're going off topic, this issue is NOT related to Hyper-V (it happens with Hyper-V disabled). It's an issue introduced with the last few versions of VB 6.x and intensified with V7. Machines take A LONG (5 to 20 seconds) time to appear after pressing the start button, but they run fine after that.

[fth0]

Machines take A LONG (5 to 20 seconds) time to appear after pressing the start button, but they run fine after that.

Please provide a (zipped) VBoxHardening.log file, which covers most of what happens before the start of the VBox.log file.

[jvidal]

Here it goes!
this is a really simple VM running DOS and win 3.1.
The machine runs perfectly and at a very good speed, it's just starting the machine that takes a lot longer than it used to.