virtualbox.org

I'm running a CentOS guest on Mac OS X. As soon as I start up the VM, the GPU usage goes to about 50%. CPU usage is fine, but for some reason the GPU goes nuts. I've played around with varying numbers of CPU cores allocated to the VM. With one core, GPU usage is around 40%, with 6 cores it's around 80%. It bounces around a little, so it's tough to tell exactly what the average is.

Also, I'm only ssh-ing into the VM, not running any graphics anything on it.

Any idea what might be going on here?

What are you using that is showing the GPU usage?
See Minimum information needed for assistance.

iStat Menus reports the GPU usage.

I'm using Virtual Box version 4.3.20.
OSX 10.9.5
CentOS 5.10

All 64-bits

I do have the virtual box guest additions installed

Thanks. I thought that might be it. What version of iStat are you using? I just installed iStat 5.03 and I'm not getting numbers anything like what you are saying. For one thing guests don't directly access the GPU. I tried a couple different guests and I couldn't even see a change in the GPU.

You do know that .80% is 8/10ths of a percent and not 80%?

HA!!! I think I've been reading the iStat Menus thing wrong. I think it's using the CPU, not the GPU.

Yeah... I couldn't imagine the guest had access to the GPU.

Still, my VM has 4 cores and it's showing 40% CPU usage. Granted, that's 40% out of 800% (I've got 4 cores + hyperthreading on my host).

Is that normal? Should I expect an idling guest to chew on 40% of a core?

The Activity Monitor shows that the process in question is VBoxHeadless.

I wouldn't worry about it. One thing to remember is VirtualBox itself is running although the guest might be idle. At any rate, I never bother looking at what my Mac is doing unless I'm having a problem such as slowed performance. That's why I had to download iStat to begin with.

Cool. Thanks for your help.

no problem.