CPU overload on Youtube videos

[Kobbe]

Laptop: HP ProBook 4540s
Processor: Intel Core i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz
Host OS: Windows 7 Professional
Guest OS: Linux MInt 18 Cinnamon
The guest has 1 (of 2) physical cores available, 1GB of RAM and 20GB of hard drive.

I managed to get rid of the software rendering mode notification by allowing VT-x
in the BIOS setup, enabling 3D acceleration and installing the Guest Additions.
However, the CPU usage of the guest is still 35-50% when idle and over 70-100% when
simply opening Firefox. Watching a Youtube video is impossible due to constant 100%
CPU usage. On the host, CPU usage remains between 5 and 15%.

I tried:
* Dummy guest, but that was mostly aimed at VB consuming host CPU

* Enabling/Disabling nested paging, but that did nothing.

Along with the things I mentioned before to get out of software rendering mode, I could
not find any other solutions. Does anyone has a suggestion to try?

[mpack]

VT-x has nothing to do with software rendering of video. Neither does nested paging. Perhaps if you have problems in future you should avoid trying random things, since you'll most likely only make things worse.

If you want improved graphics performance you must enable 3D acceleration, and install the Guest Additions. I note that you say you did this, but you haven't provided any evidence. A VM log file would be useful (with the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here).

I won't be able to say much on CPU usage unless you provide evidence on that too. For example, look at a task monitor and find out exactly where the CPU is going.

You should also consider the configuration of the guest OS, though as I'm not a Linux user I can't help you with that.

Moving this topic to "Linux Guests", since I doubt that the host has anything to do with your question.

[Kobbe]

Thanks for the reply, my apologies for the lacking information.

I checked the CPU usage in the system monitor, and Cinnamon seems to take a lot of it. When only running the
system monitor it shows 1-3% when idle, but the moment I move my mouse it raises up to 30%. When switching
to performance to see the graphs, it raises over 50%. As I found, this is usually when the guest additions are not
(correctly) installed or when 3D acceleration isn't enabled.

Following a thread at askUbuntu (can't include links yet), I tried
$ lsmod | grep -i vbox
and the guest additions seem to show up correctly.
When trying to reinstall them from the Devices => Guest additions CD iso , it says it was already installed and
removes them before installing again.

I would think the GA are installed correctly, and 3D acceleration is also shown as enabled.

I added the logs as attachment, maybe you could find something there.

[Perryg]

VirtualBox VM 5.1.8 r111374 win.amd64 (Oct 18 2016 14:42:15) release log
00:00:27.521331 VMMDev: Guest Additions information report: Version 5.0.16 r105871 '5.0.16_Ubuntu'

Two issues. One: the guest additions are out of sync with the release version of VirtualBox and two: ( more important ) you are running the distro version of the guest additions which are not compatible. I would purge the additions you have installed now and install the official ones that come with your install. ( insert from the device tab on the title bar of the guest and manually install )

[Kobbe]

Thanks already, but so far I didn't manage to purge the installed GA.

I tried
$ sudo apt-get purge virtualbox*
but that returned that there was nothing to remove

Also tried
$ sudo sh/media/VBOXADDITIONS_5.1.8_111743/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run uninstall
from the mounted CD as suggested in another forum, but that command was not found.

[mpack]

You didn't install the distro GAs from a CD, they were bundled with the OS, i.e. they were already there when the OS was first installed. The advice you followed is for how to uninstall the genuine VirtualBox GAs, not the distro fork version.

[Perryg]

You're best route if you do not know how to find the proper packages is to install synaptic and use its search to find anything with vbox or virt and see what is installed. Remove the ones associated with VirtualBox and then select to purge them. It would not hurt to reboot the guest after this to make sure that the actual modules are stopped and removed before you install the official ones.

Also keep in mind that the graphics for the guest is not using the host GPU directly and must use software to access the GPU. This does force a larger than usual amount of CPU usages but the guest should work anyway. Another thing is full screen rendering versus windowed. Full screen requires more processing power.

[Kobbe]

I would purge the additions you have installed now and install the official ones that come with your install. ( insert from the device tab on the title bar of the guest and manually install )

I was able to remove the GA I installed through the CD. What exactly do you mean by "manually install" ? If I understand it correctly, mount the Devices => Insert Guest Additions CD image again but don't follow auto-run?

I checked the present packages with

$apt-cache policy virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11

should I install these instead?

[socratis]

Please take a look at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/LinuxAdditionsDebug

[Perryg]

$apt-cache policy virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11

should I install these instead?

Absolutely not. These are from the distro repository and will put you right back to where you were before purging.

Just click the insert and then run the guest additions install from the guests terminal as sudo. They will be located in the guest cdrom

[Kobbe]

Okay I used $ sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run , and it looked exactly like the auto-run, that's normal I suppose.
I got a message saying I already have another version from another installer and I should remove that first.
I had that before when I first tried to install the GAs, and then

$ sudo apt-get purge virtualbox*

removed some items and the autorun ran without complaint. Now the command doesn't find anything to remove,
and apparently it still didn't install correctly the first time?

[Perryg]

Purging does not install it removes. After the purge you run the install as I specified above. If you use synaptic and remove all references from VirtualBox you will not get the warning you stated. Simple as that. If you do not want to install synaptic you can use apt-get and remove the packages you asked about above but this will leave room for error if you do not do everything properly and cause the install to not work as intended. Also it is imperative that you watch the terminal window during the install for any error messages. Post them if you see there was an error so we can see what it is.

[Kobbe]

I searched for vbox, virt and virtualbox in synaptic. Under virtualbox around 10 results appear with as latest version the
5.0.24 Ubuntu version we don't want, but none of them have an installed version.

The installer only gives an error saying

You appear to have a version of the Virtualbox Guest Additions which was intalled from a different source or by a different type of installer. If you installed it from a package from your Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before installing this version. If this is simply an older or damaged installation you may safely proceed.

Do you wish to continue?

Since the purge command and now the synaptic don't seem to find anything, I don't know where that could come from.

[Perryg]

It could be from several locations. Run the following in the guest elevated terminal and then see if trying to install causes an issue.


apt-get purge dkms
apt-get clean

[Kobbe]

The purge removed two things: dkms* and news...-dkms*. When rebooting as suggested by the terminal, the "software rendering mode" notification shows up again, but the installation still gives the same notification of another installed version.