Black screen with OpenGL only in full-screen mode

[abc123]

Hi All,

When I'm not in full-screen mode, I can run an OpenGL application such as glxgears, and it works fine. In full-screen mode, however, the entire screen will go black except for the contents of the window where 3D rendering is occurring. For example, with glxgears I see only the gears, and the rest of the screen is black.

I'm running Debian "jessie" as a guest with VirtualBox 5.0.10 on a Windows 7 SP1 host. Both the guest and the host are 64-bit. I've installed the guest additions for 5.0.10 via the CD image supplied with VirtualBox. 3D acceleration is enabled in the VM settings. I have version 10.3.2-1 of most of the mesa lib packages, 9.0.0-2 for libglu1-mesa. My graphics card is an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800, and I have the NVIDIA drivers installed on the host. (Previously I had a Quadro FX 570, and the behavior was exactly the same with that card.) Everything else is working fine in this Linux guest.

Any thoughts as to what the problem might be, or how I might go about tracking it down?

Thanks,
Dan

[abc123]

Attaching log. Booted the VM; changed to full-screen mode; ran glxgears to repro the problem; switched out of full-screen mode to get control of the system again; shut down; saved log.

[Perryg]

00:00:02.863853 Host RAM: 6126MB total, 3144MB available
00:00:05.135115 RamSize <integer> = 0x00000000c0000000 (3 221 225 472, 3 GB)
00:00:05.135457 VRamSize <integer> = 0x0000000008000000 (134 217 728, 128 MB)

00:00:05.135110 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000002 (2)
00:00:06.283754 CPUM: Physical host cores: 2

Running at max will cause issues Reduce the RAM and try with 1 CPU.

If this does not help you will need to debug this at the guest level.

[abc123]

Hi Perryg,

Thanks for looking into this. Tried reducing the RAM to 1G, reducing the video RAM to 64M, and dropping the CPU count to 1, all at the same time. No change in the behavior--it still exhibits the same problem. It's interesting that the problem only occurs in full-screen mode. The VirtualBox video driver must be doing something different in that mode.

Dan

[loukingjr]

FWIW, on my OSX host, Debian Jessie runs as expected in Full Screen, I.E, same as in windowed mode. VB 5.0.10.

[abc123]

Hi loukingjr,

Do you mean OpenGL applications are working normally for you in full-screen mode?

Dan

[loukingjr]

well glxgears does. I don't normally run OpenGL programs. I don't have the same symptom as you running glxgears in full screen where the whole screen is filled with black. It runs in a normal window. My DE is XFCE. Not sure what others may do.

edit: I forgot I still had a Debian 8.2 guest running Cinnamon. It runs glxgears normally as well.

re-edit: Tested my Debian 9 Gnome 'Testing' guest. Same as above.

[MrGadget49]

Any luck with this? I'm having the exact same problem. I'm running Debian Jesse on Windows 8.1. I've just upgraded my Virtualbox to the latest version and that didn't help.

I'm really trying to run FreeCAD which also exibits the exact same symptoms. I read somewhere that the problem may be related to compiz, but honestly, I don't really know what that is or how to disable it.

Any help would be appreciated greatly!

Jody

[loukingjr]

If you disable 3D acceleration that would take care of any Compiz related problems. I don't know if it will fix your issue though.

[MrGadget49]

Disabling the 3D acceleration did fix the problem and suprisingly also gave me better frame rates from glxgears. Don't know if it's going to slow down other things, but at least it fixed FreeCAD!

Jody

[loukingjr]

Glad it worked out.