virtualbox.org

In Windows, I'm accustomed to using sysinternals Process Explorer app to change the "affinity" of simultaneously running apps to favor different subsets of the available cores. (For example, to have them each inclined to use 2 unique cores out of the 4 available.) In fact, I still use ProcExp in the Windows guest OS, imagining that I am directing the apps to stay out of each other's way.

When I define a VM guest in VirtualBox running in Ubuntu, I can limit the number of processors available to it in Settings, with the System->Processors tab.

I have not found the equivalent of Process Explorer to ensure that other running Linux apps will try to avoid using the processors intended for the VM.

Q. Is there such a beast?

(I suspect that running my Windows 7 VM and native Firefox location in Linux at the same time lead to the entire system lockup I occasionally experience. I have change my m.o. to avoid running a browser in Linux while a VM is running, and instead run a browser inside the VM, which is much slower as one would expect.)

Thanks.

This sounds more like a general web-search question, instead of being a specifically-related-to-Virtualbox question:
"Linux equivalent for process explorer" or "set affinity on Linux"

To my knowledge, Virtualbox does not have affinity-setting commands. A search of the PDF copy of the Virtualbox manual shows no mention of "affinity".

Only if you found that you could set affinity for other apps on the Linux host but Virtualbox did not abide by the affinity setting you chose would it then become a Virtualbox question (though it may be a question few if any if us could answer).

Also web-search whether setting affinity might not actually hurt performance.

Finally, if you want to, we could try to troubleshoot the VM & host bowser failure you're getting, in a new topic please, and with an Upload-Attachment-posted zipped vbox.log while the VM and the browser are both running.

Have a look at taskset.