Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

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socratis
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Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by socratis »

I'm writing this from an OSX 10.13b system. VirtualBox 5.1.22 installed without a problem. That doesn't mean it runs without a problem.

10.13
It's not even alpha. I really hope Apple fixes 10.13, because if this thing stands as is, you'd better stick with what you have, whatever that may be. This thing is slower than an OSX client running inside a VM. In fact I thought I was running in a VM and I was scared to press Cmd-Q. RAM hungry, CPU thirsty, GPU molasses. Just playing an HTML5 audio-only stream in Safari hits 50% of the CPU. Yikes.

For the VirtualBox installation, there is a small difference for first time users of either 10.13 or VirtualBox, and that's a new policy from Apple, which requires that even known developers must be given a stamp of approval before they can install a kernel extension for the 1st time. Expect complains...

VirtualBox
There is a cosmetic issue where the "Details|Snapshots" tabs seem as being disabled all the time.
Removing a CD from the icon of a VM "freezes" the whole thing for 3-5 seconds.

I've seen the weirdest bug ever in several VMs with 3D acceleration enabled (Win7, Win10, Ubuntu12.04). You open a VM, wait until it loads. Then you decide to move the window. The frame of the window moves, the VM stays behind!

For example, I started a Win10 VM on the top right, and then I moved the VM window on the bottom left. The black part is the "container" of the VM that I moved (identified in MissionControl as "Windows 10"). The red part is the desktop of the VM (identified in MissionControl as "VirtualBox VM"). That one decided it didn't want to move, it really liked the starting position:
[attachment=0]10.13SplitPersonality.png[/attachment]

(BTW, on the bottom, in the Dock, the 2nd icon is the CPU and the 3rd icon is the RAM of a barely used system!)

The biggest problem with this bug, is that it throws in disarray the whole OSX window system. If you start a VM and switch to another space before the 3D accel. kicks in, all crazy things happen. Mission Control gets completely out of control.

Anyway, this is not meant to be a big post or a specific one, only a test of whether VirtualBox can install/run on OSX 10.13b. It does.

Allow me to reboot back to normalcy, I don't think I'm going to be booting again in 10.13 for quite some time...
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granada29
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by granada29 »

I just tried this with10.13b 17A315i (beta 4) and VirtualBox 5.1.26 r117224

The results were really good and I had been expecting the worst.

I ran a High Sierra guest (also beta 4) which was obviously a bit sluggish, just as it is when running on a macOS 10.12 host. The guest file system was on an external USB disk, standard vdi (i.e. not raw disk)

I then ran a Linux (debian testing) guest and that performed very well. This guest was running from an external raw disk (I was actually testing my VBoxRawdisk utility). The linux guest ran google chrome OK and I was able to watch video at acceptable frame rates with no interruptions.

The only thing that was different from running in 10.12 was I had to go into the "Security and Privacy" System Preferences and allow Oracle Corp to load a kext (VBox networking) and then reboot the machine to get VirtualBox to run. This was because of the new High Sierra restrictions on loading 3rd party kexts.

My host is a late 2012 Mac Mini, 16GB ram, OS installed on an internal SSD. High Sierra does not perform that well when installed to a spinning disk and is clearly being optimised for SSD.
michaln
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by michaln »

granada29 wrote:High Sierra does not perform that well when installed to a spinning disk and is clearly being optimised for SSD.
Naw, "optimized for SSD" just means "stupidly I/O hungry and dog slow". Modern OSes tend to be that way, you're supposed to install them on an SSD so it's assumed to be non-issue.

I'm interested in people's experiences with installing the High Sierra betas in a VM. Especially how the install was done (upgrade, clean system, etc.) and what the problems encountered were.
socratis
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by socratis »

michaln wrote:Especially how the install was done (upgrade, clean system, etc.)
Do you have a way of doing a clean install? I don't know of one. Unless by "clean install" you mean to start the installation from an existing system and install it to an external USB. And then use that USB (via a VMDK) to boot the VM. Is that what you mean?

I did just that, and the VM is "crawling" just fine. VirtualBox 5.1.27 r117576 (Qt5.6.2), host OSX 10.11.6 (15G1611), guest OSX 10.13 Beta (17A306f). System is correctly identified as a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), processor is "Unknown", RAM correctly at 3GB, vRAM incorrectly at 5 MB (known issue).

Slow as molasses due to the graphics non-optimization, the fact that it has only 3GB of RAM available, 2 vCPUs and it's running from a HDD over a USB3. I'll let it settle for awhile doing whatever background tasks it's doing going from a live 2011 MBP system (last boot), to a VM on a 2015 MBP. EDIT: it's fine at ~1% CPU utilization when idling (and hidden).

Added bonus? VirtualBox 5.1.22 (that was available in July when I installed the beta) is running fine in the VM. Of course I can't run a VM, because:

Code: Select all

VT-x is not available (VERR_VMX_NO_VMX)
not even a DOS one where VT-x is not required, because someone forgot to port REM on OSX ;)
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granada29
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by granada29 »

michaln wrote:I'm interested in people's experiences with installing the High Sierra betas in a VM. Especially how the install was done (upgrade, clean system, etc.) and what the problems encountered were.
One of the big issues I have with High Sierra in a VM is in applying the OS beta updates. VirtualBox is not running the correct boot.efi when reboot is requested by the update installer.

To workaround this issue it is necessary to repeatedly hit the F12 key during the boot, break into the EFI shell, navigate to the macOS Installation directory and then run the boot.efi manually.

If this fails for some reason then its back to the beginning and try again. A real pita and more likely to fail than succeed.

I have seen this problem with both rawdisk (VMDK) installations and VDI installations. It also happens with macOS Sierra as the host OS and debian Linux (on Apple hardware) as the host OS. It's not a problem specific to macOS VirtualBox.
socratis
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by socratis »

granada29 wrote:One of the big issues I have with High Sierra in a VM is in applying the OS beta updates. VirtualBox is not running the correct boot.efi when reboot is requested by the update installer.
Now you're telling me? I spent yesterday all day downloading again and again and again... the 2.5 GB update for my 10.13b4 external USB-based OSX VM. Finally I gave up, booted the computer from the external USB, and the update flew. Thanks for the tip. Is the procedure something like the following?
F12                          (multiple times at boot to enter the EFI shell)
Boot Manager
EFI Internal shell
FS2:                         (to switch to the EFI partition)
ls                           (to verify that "com.apple.recovery.boot" is there)
cd com.apple.recovery.boot
boot.efi                     (will boot you to the installation phase)
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granada29
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by granada29 »

socratis wrote:Is the procedure something like the following?
I think your example will probably boot the recovery partition. Usually the drive is at FS1:

I have used the procedure described at https://raimue.blog/2017/06/09/upgradin ... irtualbox/

It is possible that the actual location of boot.efi depends on :

1) your hardware setup and
2)The version of the macOS 10.13 installer

However - it is a pretty cumbersome way to have to apply an update. I am not sure whether to report this as a VB bug - 10.13 is still in a state of flux and I suppose Apple could change the way they are doing things before the final release of 10.13.
socratis
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by socratis »

granada29 wrote:I think your example will probably boot the recovery partition. Usually the drive is at FS1:
You're correct. I copied that procedure from my "Building VirtualBox ≥ 5.1.2 on OSX ≥ 10.9" post, which requires a boot to the recovery partition in order to disable SIP.

Funny thing is that I copied the procedure from a blog post titled "Disabling System Integrity Protection from guest El Capitan under VirtualBox 5", which incidentally was the inspiration for the blog post "Upgrading a VM from macOS 10.12 Sierra to macOS 10.13 High Sierra in VirtualBox" that you quoted as well. ;)

Funny (in an other way) that we have to scour the web for information like that and not get something official from the developers... :(
granada29 wrote:I am not sure whether to report this as a VB bug
I'd weigh in the "Yes" option...
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michaln
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by michaln »

socratis wrote:Funny (in an other way) that we have to scour the web for information like that and not get something official from the developers... :(
Official reminder #1: Oracle's interest in supporting OS X guests is directly proportional to customer interest in OS X guests.
Official reminder #2: VirtualBox is an open source product, all the relevant code is public. We accept patches.

A non-official comment is that the reason you have to scour the web for information is that Apple does not document these things.
granada29
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Re: Success with 10.13b (17A306f)

Post by granada29 »

I have submitted https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17030 for the problem with installing macOS 10.13 updates in VirtualBox.
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