virtualbox.org

To all,

I'm pretty new to VirtualBox as I've mainly used qemu previously under Fedora 10 x64 version. I recently installed VirtualBox on a MacBook and thought it performed as well as, if not better, than qemu, so I figured I'd give it a shot on my Fedora box. I have an XP VM up and running and I've been trying to speed it up a bit. However, I'm concerned about a warning displayed during boot.

The warning is: warning: `VirtualBox' uses 32-bit capabilities (legacy support in use)

Is this something I should be concerned about? I have a 64bit processor, I'm running the 64-bit version of Fedora 10 and I'm unsure of what this message means. I googled it but came up with nothing. Performance on XP under Fedora seems painfully slow at times whereas performance under the MacBook was outstanding. I have 4GB DDR2 RAM in the machine with 2GB dedicated to the XP VM. I also have an Intel Centrino Core2 Duo processor -- a T7500 which is clocked at 2.20GHz, on both cores.

Is the warning message above something I should be concerned about? What about improving performance on the XP VM? I would think that performance would be a lot better than what I'm experiencing right now, but I can't figure out why performance is crawling. The VM Additions are installed and working, I added the Intel Pro 1000/MT drivers as well as the Intel Matrix Storage drivers for the SATA controller but perfomance is still sluggish.

Any suggestions?

Which build did you install on your Host? Was it the 32 bit (x86) one, or the 64 bit (AMD64)?

I downloaded the x86_64 version of the 2.1.4 RPM. Install went fine, the only thing was that it said it had to compile the drivers during the install of the RPM which it did, and it built successfully.

Ok, that is at least good. I've never heard of that message before here on the forums. Might be your distro that's giving this message. Do you have other 32 bit software running? Other users might be aware of the message and never mentioned it here.

Well, the good news is that I fixed my performance issues with my XP VM. After browsing the fourms here I found that enabling the IO APIC option on a Windows 32-bit OS causes CPU spikes between 90-100% and it never drops below that. I killed my VM, recreated it with the new settings and performance is just fine now. However, that warning is still showing itself during boot. I'm not exactly sure what it means yet, I'm pretty sure I'm not running any 32-bit services or apps or anything, but then again, I'm not sure if any RPM dependencies are 32-bit or not. No big deal, as my VM is performing just fine now.

Thanks for the help though.

Searching with Google on the error you get, gives some results of other Distro's giving the error. It's harmless. It comes from libpcap.