12.04 Ubuntu is extremely slow

[silvercat]

Windows 7. Vbox 4.2
core 2 duo 2.0
4GB RAM.

Old Ubuntu, windows guests are working fine.it is 12.04 . I gave 1024MB RAM to that. help !

[stefan.becker]

No help possible without details.

Post the log file.

[silvercat]

http://tny.cz/a1fc2426
here is the log

[Perryg]

Newer OSes require a lot more horsepower, especially with high graphics. Since your processor does not support hardware virtualization it is going to be slow.
The VBox team has in the past been able to tune this to work better but I have not seen any work in this area for a while so I assume it can't be adjusted any more.

[michaln]

I have not seen any work in this area for a while so I assume it can't be adjusted any more.

I'm sure it can, but it's a case of rapidly diminishing returns. It's much better to work on features that will be useful 3 years from now rather than features that were useful 3 years ago.

The truth is that for the cost of a new CPU, you can't buy a whole lot of developers' time.

[Perryg]

The truth is that for the cost of a new CPU, you can't buy a whole lot of developers' time.

You know I have seen this statement used for the lack of improvement several times. Have you ever bought a newer CPU and tried to get it alone to work? It almost always requires a new motherboard which most of the time requires a new power supply and don't forget the RAM that is not compatible any more. Not to mention that you can't upgrade a processor in a laptop. So those that need to upgrade usually spend hundreds. Add to that the economy and it is not as simple as this.

I personally have no issue if VirtualBox does not want to improve the 32-bit or non-VT-x environment due to its age because on one machine I have VT-x, but on my non-VT-x machines I am forced to use a competitor and that does give me concern.

[silvercat]

I ran it on VMware player. now ok.

[michaln]

I personally have no issue if VirtualBox does not want to improve the 32-bit or non-VT-x environment due to its age because on one machine I have VT-x, but on my non-VT-x machines I am forced to use a competitor and that does give me concern.

If you think about it, you can guess what the situation is like. The users willing to pay for VirtualBox are also the ones willing to buy current hardware. They get to call the shots. Is that unfair? I wouldn't think so...

VMware and VPC started out long, long before hardware virtualization was even a glint in Intel's eye. They had to spend a lot of time on their non-hardware-virtualized support because they had no choice. VirtualBox was being written as VT-x and AMD-V were emerging, and even though VirtualBox wasn't designed to always require hardware virtualization, it made sense to require HW virtualization for "advanced" features like 64-bit guests or guest SMP, simply because the number of hosts out there that can support 64-bit or are multi-core but have no hardware virtualization is not very large, and getting smaller every day.

If folks don't like that, they're more than welcome to contribute some performance optimizations. The source is all out there. If that's too much work... well, maybe that's exactly why we don't want to spend time on it?

And if VMware player or Virtual PC or whatever works better for you, by all means use it. It would be silly not to!

[DNS]

I personally have no issue if VirtualBox does not want to improve the 32-bit or non-VT-x environment due to its age because on one machine I have VT-x, but on my non-VT-x machines I am forced to use a competitor and that does give me concern.

I find that there is an unbearable slowdown due to distros that have very bloated GUIs. How would improvements to the ,non VT-x, CPU side of things improve that though? Perry do you make use of 3D acceleration for these machines? In comparison to Ubuntu, an XP machine is lighting fast. Other distros that have xfce or lxde seem to be ok too.

@MichalN Would optimizing for OpenBSD without VT-x be a similarly large undertaking? I found that running it from the VBoxSDL with --rawr0 allowed it to work normally. Is there a simple work around to get this to automatically work from the main VirtualBox executable?

[Perryg]

I find that there is an unbearable slowdown due to distros that have very bloated GUIs. How would improvements to the ,non VT-x, CPU side of things improve that though? Perry do you make use of 3D acceleration for these machines? In comparison to Ubuntu, an XP machine is lighting fast. Other distros that have xfce or lxde seem to be ok too.

Using XP which is an older OS as is anything pre- Kernel-3.* and the tuning is mostly fine for those. I also understand the aspects of the GUI but this is not the bottleneck. CSAM/PATM is and has nothing to do with graphics per say.

Like I said I get it and know why, its just an issue that it is said to be functional and since support has waned it is not. Read the manual where it is boasted about how good VirtualBox software virtualization is and how they achieve it.

If I had any idea how to fix this I would, but I don't, and from the looks of it no one else does either as only the developers have the knowledge to do so. If they are not of a mind to fix this then it goes away without issue but should be noted that newer OSes are not going to work properly.

michaln, are you saying as an official statement that support is all but ceased for this issue, or so far down the list it is essentially not supported? Like I said I can appreciate the unwillingness and can support the decision, I just would like to know if this is the final determination and that Oracle (due to your statement) suggests to use a different Virtualizer if you need to use software virtualization.

[michaln]

michaln, are you saying as an official statement that support is all but ceased for this issue, or so far down the list it is essentially not supported?

No, I'm just saying that support depends on (paying) customer demand. We can't predict what that is going to be, we just know the general trend.

[michaln]

@MichalN Would optimizing for OpenBSD without VT-x be a similarly large undertaking? I found that running it from the VBoxSDL with --rawr0 allowed it to work normally. Is there a simple work around to get this to automatically work from the main VirtualBox executable?

That's hard to say without knowing the details. For some guests, there may be relatively(!) simple fixes that could be done. In other cases (notably OS/2), the guest is fundamentally incompatible with our software virtualization and cannot be supported without a major redesign.

I don't know which category OpenBSD falls into.

[DNS]

I don't know which category OpenBSD falls into.

MichalN if there is a way I can help you determine the details for this issue let me know. From what I glean, there is no fundamental incompatibility like the case with OS/2, rather its some -ring 3?-instruction that patm sometimes doesn't play nice with. Disabling code patching/emulation seems to be a good workaround and it still works as of 2012: http://jreypo.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/ ... irtualbox/
Same workaround applies for the other members of the *BSDs in my experience and also MINIX.

IIRC correctly OS/2 has a video subsystem that relies on ring 2 virtualization in software which simply doesn't fit with the way most virtualizers work as VBox only handles Rings 1 and 3 in software mode. Connectrix specialized in supporting OS/2 in all its products back in the day which explains why only VPC supports it today in BT mode.

[michaln]

MichalN if there is a way I can help you determine the details for this issue let me know. From what I glean, there is no fundamental incompatibility like the case with OS/2, rather its some -ring 3?-instruction that patm sometimes doesn't play nice with.

What would help is analyzing exactly what it is that's going wrong from the guest's perspective. If it's PATM that's going wrong (I certainly believe that), then there may be some instruction that's being incorrectly overwritten or something like that.

IIRC correctly OS/2 has a video subsystem that relies on ring 2 virtualization in software which simply doesn't fit with the way most virtualizers work as VBox only handles Rings 1 and 3 in software mode.

That's not the worst problem. OS/2 also very aggressively uses the GDT and LDT, which means the raw mode hypervisor can't easily hide within the guest's address space.

Connectrix specialized in supporting OS/2 in all its products back in the day which explains why only VPC supports it today in BT mode.

Connectix. Their history was very different, as they started out on PowerPC Macs. I don't know that they specialized in supporting OS/2, but on a PowerPC they couldn't take any shortcuts so their CPU emulation was in a way forced to be more complete.

[DNS]

OK some very strange but good news

Somehow after running across this thread: viewtopic.php?t=2582

I got the idea to increase Video RAM all the way to 256 MB, even though it turns out they meant system ram. Anyway, I went into the default settings template for OpenBSD and checked IOAPIC, PAE/NX, enabled bridged networking, enabled hardware clock UTC, enabled absolute pointing device, disabled the virtual floppy drive from booting. No changes to system ram -64mb- were made or anything else not mentioned.

OpenBSD version 5.1 on non VTx system without resorting to the norawr0 hack. Therefore I think we can safely exclude the PATM as a problem maker. It has something to do with default settings template not working with the a newer relase since 2007.

The above settings were enabled gradually I don't know what happened or at what point something clicked. For completion I'll also mention that I enabled synthcpu from VBoxManage but disabled it again after it didn't work. With the above settings, OpenBSD has installed flawlessly and boots up without getting seizures [segfaults]. I forgot to create a user account during install, but thats a stupid mistake, otherwise all is well

EDIT: Apparently the SynthCPU setting wasn't ever enabled anyway, according to Klaus if no cpuid values were specified -which was the case, then the option would have been silently turned off.

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9524

The rest appears to be a user error - if you enable SynthCPU you have to specify precisely what cpuid values the synthetic CPU should report. If you don't do that all features will be turned off, and that means the guest CPU reports no 64bit support.

EDIT 2: I can confirm that it was because IOAPIC wasn't enabled by default all along! When it is, OpenBSD functions normally without VT-x When disabling it there are kernel traps and segfaults that prevent me from even getting to the login screen.