Changing print settings (e.g. with/without printing queue) in guest has no influence on the issue.
The issue shows up in both for me available windows versions
- Win 2000 professional (last servicepack)
- Win XP home (last servicepack)
- Intel Pentium 4 on a Medion MD 5000 board
- Intel Pentium M in RIM 2000 notebook
- AMD Athlon Thunderbird on a Elitegroup K7S5A board (2GB RAM)
- AMD Athlon XP ona a Elitegroup K7S5A board (2GB RAM)
- AMD Sempron (64bit) on Foxconn M61PMV board (4GB RAM)
- AMD Athlon 64 on Foxconn M61PMV board (4GB RAM)
- Intel Core i3 540 on Asustek P7P55-M board (8GB RAM)
The issue is independend of usage of a swap partition and amount of free RAM.
Same finding on all systems and all the virtualbox versions, latest version checked was 7.04 (can't check 7.06, there is no install candidate in apt, and installation of manually downloaded package fails. Have to wait until it makes its way into the default repos.)
The proper guest additions for the installed virtualbox version have been installed in the guest systems.
Printer is always physically connected to LPT1
and was made available to the guest systems by e.g.
Code: Select all
$ sudo rmmod lp
$ VBoxManage modifyvm "Win2000SP4" --lptmode1 "/dev/parport0"
$ VBoxManage modifyvm "Win2000SP4" --lpt1 0x378 7
After printing the page (or pages) has finished as well printer as also the guest systems show perfectly normal behaviour, which means:
Printer displays idle mode („ready”), accepting next task
Windows guest in virtualbox shows printing task was successfully completed and virtual CPU is back to 0%
But on all host systems now virtualbox eats up 100% real cpu.
On single core systems the complete cpu is blocked by virtualbox, the cooling fan driving mad,
On multicore systems a single core stays at 100% load, (causing the average system load displayed as e.g. 25%)
Switching off the idling printer doesn't solve the issue. The system load stays at 100% from virtualbox process.
Only pausing the virtual machine immediately sets back the host system load, while continuing causes 100% system load again.
Additional printing tasks from within the guest system are accepted and executed properly, but again after the tasks are completed the host system cpu load stays at 100% load from virtualbox, while within guest 0% load is displayed for the virtual cpu.
Only shutting down and starting anew the guest system allows normal working on host system without 100% system load from virtualbox, until another page needs to get printed from within the guest.
The hole issue is not observed when installing the Windows system directly on the plain hardware instead in virtualbox.