Guest Screen Blanks on Loss of Attention

[urilabob]

Apologies if this has been dealt with before - I haven't been able to find suitable search terms to identify it.

Since about 4.2.10, I have been seeing weird behaviour with virtualbox screen handling. While the focus is on the virtualbox guest, it behaves normally. As soon as attention is shifted to any other application, the virtualbox screen blanks. When attention is shifted back to the virtualbox guest, the screen stays black. Selecting a region of the virtualbox guest's screen often (but not always) causes that region of the screen to unblank. This behaviour is independent of whether the guest is being displayed on the laptop's main screen or an external display. Interestingly, the preview screen on the virtualbox console does not blank, and behaves as expected at all times.

The behaviour is independent of guest OS - I am seeing identical symptoms in both Windows XP and fedora guests (the fedora guest has been reinstalled a number of times, most recently to fedora 19). It has also persisted over a number of updates to virtualbox, most recently to 4.2.16.

I have tried fiddling with the virtualbox display settings (video memory, 2d acceleration), with no effect.

I would greatly appreciate any advice on where to look for possible solutions to this problem.

System:
Macbook air 1.6GHz core 2 duo
OS X version 10.6.8
VirtualBox 4.2.16
Video details:
NVIDIA GeForce 320M:

Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 320M
Type: GPU
Bus: PCI
VRAM (Total): 256 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x08a2
Revision ID: 0x00a2
ROM Revision: 3571
Displays:
Color LCD:
Resolution: 1366 x 768
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes
Connection Type: DisplayPort
YOSUNZAN3-1003-17:
Resolution: 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Rotation: Supported

[ChipMcK]

In each Guest, the power management need to be set to not blank the screen.
I also suggest that the Guest not be allowed to sleep; OSX will handle it when OSX sleeps.

[urilabob]

Thanks for thinking about it, Chip. Unfortunately I don't think this is an issue of guest screen saving or power management. I probably didn't explain one aspect clearly enough: the guest doesn't blank after some time when attention is switched. It blanks immediately the focus goes to another application. Just to be sure, I set the windows guest to never screensave or do any power management. The behaviour didn't change.

[TeeJay88]

I have the same problem also. The blanking sometimes is in blocks, it seems as if the guest screen wasn't updated. I didn't have such problems when I was running V4.1.24. I think the problem appeared when V4.2.0 was released.

[noteirak]

Please read Minimum information needed for assistance.
Without the VM log file and the guest settings, not much we can do here...

[urilabob]

Please read Minimum information needed for assistance.
Without the VM log file and the guest settings, not much we can do here...

Ooops sorry.
Host: MacAir running OSX 10.6.8 (I assume 64-bit, not sure how to check).
Guest: Linux version 3.11.1-200.fc19.x86_64 (mockbuild@bkernel02) (gcc version 4.8.1 20130603 (Red Hat 4.8.1-1) (GCC) ) #1 SMP Sat Sep 14 15:04:51 UTC 2013
VBox Version: 4.2.18 (but present in all recent versions); Guest Additions installed

Host Memory: 4GB (plus another 4G virtual). Showing as 1.22GB wired, 1.85GB active, 772MB inactive, 187MB free. But I'm pretty sure it's not a host memory problem - even if I kill all other programs, the problem still occurs.

Guest Memory: 1GB allocated, currently showing 578MB free

Exactly the same problem also occurs in a windows xp guest (sorry, don't know my way around xp well enough to find the equivalent info).

[noteirak]

Well you are pretty low on RAM :

Code: Select all

00:00:01.416517 Host RAM: 4096MB total, 1274MB available
00:00:01.632501   RamSize         <integer> = 0x0000000040000000 (1 073 741 824, 1 024 MB)
00:00:01.633529   VRamSize         <integer> = 0x0000000000c00000 (12 582 912, 12 MB)

Try with 512 Mb RAM in the VM first.

[Jummy]

Hi

I had a similar problem with my Win 8 guest. Turned out it was 3D acceleration that caused it. You mention 2D acceleration but you could try leaving that enabled and disable 3D acc.

Regards Jimi