virtualbox.org

Sorry to say this guys, but I am going to upgrade to 2.4 from 3.0.

Random lockups running fresh install of XP. It's actually quite repeatable for me. Just hit reload in firefox 3.5 a few times on a WWW page I'm working on and the CPU goes to 100% for virtualbox and nothing in the VM responds to anything. Not the start menu, not the browser, not the window decorations, not the context menus...

Windows Vista 64bit host, Fedora 10 64bit guest, dual-core Athlon 64 X2:
SMP (2 cores for the guest) is unstable. 3D support stops working, occasional kernel oops, machine becomes unresponsive after being idle for a couple of hours. Had to go back to 1 CPU for now.

Roman

host vista x64 sp2, guest: any

starting a VM with a ISO mounted which is no longer available will cause an exception before even booting, even when the CD is not set as bootable device. One would expect the VM to boot from the harddisk normally and just show No Disk inserted after bootup.

I have just recently build virtualbox-ose-3.0.0-dfsg-2 for lenny.

The guest smp support seems to be working well.

I have been having a lot of problems with the internal networking. I have a "main server" VM with two nic's. The first nic is attached to tap0 via the vboxnetflt module. The second nic is attached to an internal network. I run dhcpd, bind, tftpd and an nfs server over the second nic. The main server hosts live images for other VM's, which I boot using pxe. This is how I install the other VM's, whether they be linux or windows.

I've noticed that the internal network often stops, and doesn't come back. This happens often. Usually rebooting one of the diskless VM's will make it work again, but there has been one time, so far, that the internal network wouldn't work even after a reboot (i.e. the pxe clients wouldn't get an ip). Rebooting the server seemed to make this go away, and I've only experience that problem once. Most of the time, what I get is "nfs server not responding..." on those machines, and it won't work again without a reboot. The machines usually will run for about 3-5 minutes before the problem occurs. I've noticed that this happens consistently, until I restart the Qt gui. Once the gui is terminated and started again, things begin to work normally for a while, or at least much longer than a few minutes. I think having a high load avg might cause this to start happening, but I'm not sure yet. I've only been testing the new version for a few hours. The previous version that I was using, is 2.1.4, and I've been using that since it was released, without any major problems.

I've also noticed another thing that is odd. I run gkrellm on my desktop, which I use to watch the network activity on tap0. I've noticed that transfers between the VM and the host on that interface don't get above ~150KBytes/s. The actual speed is anywhere from 3-7MBytes/s (I tested using wget on a 500MB file, the rate seems to depend more on disk activity, than anything else). While this problem isn't a show-stopper, I figured that you may want to be aware of it.

I haven't had the time to test the opengl support yet, even on the 2.1.4 version.
(I took so long in writing this post, that my login session expired. If I hadn't thought ahead to copy this to the clipboard, it would all be lost. I clicked "return to previous page and got an empty textarea when I logged back in.)

SMP doesn't work well for me, I am have 64bit linux host with 32bit vista guest, I've turned on the following options:

Enable I/O APIC
Enable VT-x/AMD-V”
change to have 2 processor

The guest system can boot, but after a while it hang and stop responsing. Do I need to reinstall Vista if I like to enable SMP?

My Mac OS X ver. 10.5.7, Virtual Box ver. 3.0.0 and guest O/S Windows XP Pro SP3. Having problem with iSight and microphone. These devices work correctly using Bootcamp with guest XP Pro P3 or in Mac OS.

1. iSight installed, recognized but activated web-cam window is black. Upon closing VB, iSight works correctly in OS X and via Bootcamp with XP Pro SP3.
2. Microphone is also having the same problem.

Had checked that I'm having the latest version of Virtual Box. Please advice if I need to fix something or these are still VB bugs to be resolve.

Sorry to say this, but I have to revert to 2.2.4 as well.

- With more then one CPU (which is the main reason to upgrade) the system will always hang up at some point.
- With only one CPU, the host will at some point report "Out of ressources" which does not only affect the guest, but even the host can no longer properly display windows and after a while crashes with a bluescreen.

Virtual Box is a great program, and one reasons for this is that is stable and reliable. So please do not rush new features and cut on quality, or ou will in the end loose more users than if you had delayed it for another few weeks.

Host:
OpenSolaris 2009.06
64 bit kernel
Dell Latitude D620
T5600 Core 2 Duo @ 1.83 GHz
4 GB RAM
5200 RPM HDD
VirtualBox v3.0.0

Guest:
Windows XP SP3
32 bit kernel
~1.5 GB RAM configured in VM

I just tried out VirtualBox for the first time. What I actually did was ghost off my long-time native XP image after prepping it for permanent migration to a VBox VM, put OS 2009.06 fresh on the laptop, installed VBox v3.0.0, config'd a VM, and ghost'd the XP image into the VM.

I was eager to try the VT-x approach with I/O APIC, as that was the native setting for my XP image, pre-VM.

The performance was horrificly slow. Repeat: Horrificly slow. I tried turning on two processors in the VM config. It ran slower. I repeat, with two processors, it ran slower. It didn't look like the host processor was doing too badly, though, during all this slowness.

I converted the HAL to PIC (instead of APIC) and turned off the I/O APIC setting in the VM. The performance was much more tolerable.

However, I feel like I can't go back now. As you know, you can downgrade from APIC to PIC in Windows, but you can't really go back up to APIC without doing a repair install, which can be traumatic.

And, with the I/O APIC turned off in the VM, I can't make use of the second processor core with VT-x. Not that I'd want to, given the truly atrocious performance I witnessed with I/O APIC and SMP turned on.

I suspect this performance "bug" will eventually be repaired in a later release of VBox. I have a snapshot made from before I made the APIC to PIC downgrade to try it out again when the time comes, but I'm not sure I'll want to keep the old snapshot around forever.

Just installed version 3 and it was easy to notice the difference. For one, the XP guest boots to the desktop almost as fast as it did from any previous version's saved state. There's also better VM performance; I don't see any speed difference between running my CAD app in the XP VM and in the native XP. Another difference is in using less ram. XP on Lenny with VBox 1.6 - 2.2.4 used over 900MB (includes host system and cached). Same thing with 3.0 now uses about 360MB. Although I haven't yet experimented with them, I really like the improvements to the settings.

Been a long time since I've seen this level of version improvement in any software, on any platform. Great job, and thanks!

There problems here since upgraded from 2.2.4 to 3.0
1. Registration Dialog is a really annoying dialog.
2. Guest Ubuntu login screen mode is wrong (Image is totally screwed up to one line, might be some unsupported mode)
3. Whenever using FireFox in guest Ubtuntu OS, guest OS locked frequently.

Just one day's try, downgrade to 2.2.4 already. Waiting for 3.x bug fixing releasing.

Hi all,

Windows XP host, Ubuntu 9.04 guest

I had lots of stability issues with the 3.0 release as well. I installed the 3.02 release as soon as possible in the hope that it would help with stability, and I must say that at the moment I seem to have a rock-solid system! I've had the VM up for 3 days now on my laptop. Many suspend/resumes etc. Not terribly heavy use in the guest apart from a few really big downloads (at >300KB/s).

Shared folders seem to be faster than in 2.2.4 as well btw, except when I try to access any "offline files" (eg. my H: drive is a network drive with offline files, and I've shared that as /mnt/H in the VM). Those are horribly unusably slow. So I don't access them. They drive the load of the VM through the roof as well.

My VM XML config is attached in case somebody is interested.

Maarten

Testing on Vista x64 host, with SuSE x64 guest. Seamless mode doesn't work on anything but the primary monitor. I originally figured that it had never been implemented, but ran across a note on the site saying something to the effect that it should work with 1.6+, so I guess that makes it a bug rather than a feature request.

It seems someone forgot to make an official 3.0.2 discuss post

Hi every body, I don´t know if this is the correct place for this post. Let's see.
1. I had VBox 2.2.4 installed, host vista x64. Lot's of VM´s, mostly linux flavors, one bsd, one solaris, one windows xp x86.
2. Upgraded to VBox 3.0.0. Started XP VM, it was really SLOW, when it finally finished booting, I installed the additions. It hanged. Would not boot again.
3. Decided to recover my entire vista "C" drive. (Acronis), OK, Started VBox 224 again: XP guest was totally corrupted, had to erase it.
4. Looked arround some. Waited a couple of days, out comes VBox 3.0.2
5. Installed it. (Upgrade). Booted an Linux Mint 7.0 x86 guest. SLOW to boot, but no as slow as the xp before. Installed the guest addins. It took a COMPLETE HALF AN HOUR TO INSTALL. (guest has 2gb ram assigned).
6. Rebooted guest. X wont come up, I don't even get the login screen, just a black screen with a garbled green small border on top.
7. Went back to 2.2.4. Thanks god this time I had also backuped the guest VM.

This is a disaster. NEVER before I had these problems when upgrading VBox. Usually I upgraded, installed the new additions in the guests & went on working...
All my 10 or 12 Guests are highly customized. I don't want to install everything again.
Please guys; what gives what should I do

Upgraded to 3.0.2

Install of windows xp in a VM with 2 CPUs took 5x longer than installing in a VM with 1 CPU.

With 2 CPUs enabled, it dogged my machine so bad that seamless windows took several seconds to render when dragged around.

This is Ubuntu Jaunty x64 host, XP guest.