Virtualbox and Fedora

rezerekted

rezerekted

2[H]4U
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Apr 6, 2015
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Anyone know what settings I need to use in Oracle Virtualbox to get usable performance in Fedora? I used the default settings for Virtualbox and when I opened Firefox in Fedora it became a slide show.
 
You're likely running in software rendering mode.
 
If the guest additions don't help try running in gnome classic mode or with a different DE like mate.
 
Virtualbox often has horrible performance. Why not run linux on bare metal instead?
 
B00nie said:
Virtualbox often has horrible performance. Why not run linux on bare metal instead?
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We're using it extensively and performance for Linux guests is very close to native if the VM and the host are properly configured. It's not as easy to optimize for as VMWare, but since we have optimized, performance has been functionally identical for us. We have several dozen Debian and RHEL guests running in production on top of VBox, what configurations are you running where performance is a problem?

I come down on the opposite side of the coin: there are very few reasons anymore to run Linux on bare metal because it's so heavily optimized for VM/containerized usage at this point. We've migrated to BSD variants for all of our bare-metal use cases (mostly network stack and host hypervisors) and almost exclusively containerize Linux at this point, with no significant performance degradation.

To help with OP's query: Make sure your host hardware supports VT extensions on the CPU. Make sure you're not using graphics acceleration on the desktop (or a desktop environment in general) unless you actually need it. Make sure you have the guest extensions installed.
 
CEpeep said:
To help with OP's query: Make sure your host hardware supports VT extensions on the CPU. Make sure you're not using graphics acceleration on the desktop (or a desktop environment in general) unless you actually need it. Make sure you have the guest extensions installed.
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It just sounds like he's running Windows, VB... I don't think this allows for graphics acceleration, which of course is going to lead to a slideshow. When I mess around with VMs on my work desktop (Windows 7), even with giving it two cpus, and plenty of ram, the browser is always laggy in KDE/Gnome/Plasma enviroments.
 
Ruoh said:
It just sounds like he's running Windows, VB... I don't think this allows for graphics acceleration, which of course is going to lead to a slideshow. When I mess around with VMs on my work desktop (Windows 7), even with giving it two cpus, and plenty of ram, the browser is always laggy in KDE/Gnome/Plasma enviroments.
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Yeah, if OP's just trying to use a browser and no other graphical applications, he/she should axe the DE completely or use something super light like LXDE or just Blackbox.

Modern Linux desktop environments (or rather the compositing engines upon which all of them are now constructed) expect native access to the GPU. If you cut that part out of the picture, you can get a fluid desktop experience inside of the VBox window that's indistinguishable from the app running natively. With the right host and guest configuration, native GPU commands can be passed out of the VM and right to the GPU, but if all it's for is Firefox, it's not necessary. This will work on a Windows host as long as the GPU is modern, but it requires configuration inside of the VM to support.
 
CEpeep said:
We're using it extensively and performance for Linux guests is very close to native if the VM and the host are properly configured. It's not as easy to optimize for as VMWare, but since we have optimized, performance has been functionally identical for us. We have several dozen Debian and RHEL guests running in production on top of VBox, what configurations are you running where performance is a problem?
Click to expand...

I only use virtualbox on OSX and there it's markedly slower than Parallels. I quit using Parallels because they extorted money for each 'update' that was 'required' after an OS update.

On servers I use KVM which seems to have excellent performance despite having the same sort of user interface like Vbox.
 
B00nie said:
I only use virtualbox on OSX and there it's markedly slower than Parallels. I quit using Parallels because they extorted money for each 'update' that was 'required' after an OS update.

On servers I use KVM which seems to have excellent performance despite having the same sort of user interface like Vbox.
Click to expand...

KVM is what we use on servers as well, but our developers build for those environments by using VBox VMs on their local workstations (a mix of Mac and Windows). Making sure your VMs are optimized for specific tasks is a big part of getting better performance out of VBox, especially from an interface responsiveness standpoint. If at all possible, run your VMs without X/Wayland. If you need to use a graphical application, give it its own VM with as little overhead as possible. This means never running a full desktop environment unless you're actually building for or testing in that specific DE.

I'm curious if the slowness you saw vs Parallels was simply on the interface responsiveness side or if it also extended to lowered vCPU performance as well. I definitely feel that VBox has gotten worse on the Mac over the past few years as Oracle gradually siphons off development talent on it. My hope is that Apple will eventually wrap KVM into OS X at some level now that they have switched away from using VMWare internally and onto KVM. On Windows, VBox seems to still work about as well as it always has, but the lack of support for Win 8/10 interface features is becoming burdensome as our developers move to devices like the Surface Pro.
 
Thanks for the tips. I found my issue was because I didn't give it enough ram.

As for running on metal, I do have Fedora on a bootable USB stick and wouldn't mind it on HDD too but need to disconnect all my HDDs except H: so I can install Linux to that HDD and use bios boot menu to boot Linux, too lazy to do that right now and don't want Grub in my Windows system mbr either.
 
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rezerekted said:
Thanks for the tips. I found my issue was because I didn't give it enough ram.

As for running on metal, I do have Fedora on a bootable USB stick and wouldn't mind it on HDD too but need to disconnect all my HDDs except H: so I can install Linux to that HDD and use bios boot menu to boot Linux, too lazy to do that right now and don't want Grub in my Windows system mbr either.
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That's a simple one. Just get rid of windows ;)
 
CEpeep said:
KVM is what we use on servers as well, but our developers build for those environments by using VBox VMs on their local workstations (a mix of Mac and Windows). Making sure your VMs are optimized for specific tasks is a big part of getting better performance out of VBox, especially from an interface responsiveness standpoint. If at all possible, run your VMs without X/Wayland. If you need to use a graphical application, give it its own VM with as little overhead as possible. This means never running a full desktop environment unless you're actually building for or testing in that specific DE.

I'm curious if the slowness you saw vs Parallels was simply on the interface responsiveness side or if it also extended to lowered vCPU performance as well. I definitely feel that VBox has gotten worse on the Mac over the past few years as Oracle gradually siphons off development talent on it. My hope is that Apple will eventually wrap KVM into OS X at some level now that they have switched away from using VMWare internally and onto KVM. On Windows, VBox seems to still work about as well as it always has, but the lack of support for Win 8/10 interface features is becoming burdensome as our developers move to devices like the Surface Pro.
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That's what I do. I keep separate VMs for mysql and separate VM with lxde-core + xinit only for graphical front-end.
 
Darakian said:
That's a simple one. Just get rid of windows ;)
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Need Windows for gaming purposes. I have now set aside 10GB of a HDD for a Linix distro once I have decided which to put there.

I have now set up VM to use Puppy Linux and LPS (public release). LPS is lightweight and think this is what I will use mostly in a VM, Puppy Linux has some weird mouse issue and don't know how to fix it.

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) creates a secure end node from trusted media on almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots a thin Linux operating system from a CD or USB flash stick without mounting a local hard drive. Administrator privileges are not required; nothing is installed. The LPS family was created to address particular use cases: LPS-Public is a safer, general-purpose solution for using web-based applications. The accredited LPS-Remote Access is only for accessing your organization's private network.
 
Which puppy version were you using? Puppy does _not_ run good in a vm usually so if you were testing it there, don't. Install it directly to a USB3 stick and boot from there.

Simplicity linux is one of the best puppy versions IMO.
 
It is slacko-6.3.0. I know the issue is due to the VM but both Fedora and LPS have no such issue. I've used Puppy before and may install it to USB stick but I am just testing out different distros in a VM to see which one I will install later. Fast and light is what I want too.
 
rezerekted said:
It is slacko-6.3.0. I know the issue is due to the VM but both Fedora and LPS have no such issue. I've used Puppy before and may install it to USB stick but I am just testing out different distros in a VM to see which one I will install later. Fast and light is what I want too.
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When I found out about puppy the first time I was really disappointed, it didn't boot at all (in VM). Luckily I was stubborn enough to make a physical copy and was surprised by a very much working system.
 
Last night I used this little prog called YUMIPortable to create a Multiboot setup on my USB 3.0 stick so now have Fedora, Puppy and LPS all running off the same 128GB thumbdrive. Puppy has no mouse issue running that way but still prefer Fedora. Will try one more distro before deciding for sure.

One odd thing about Fedora is that in the settings panel it has GUI for pretty much all hardware except the video card. Why would that be?

LPS only shows my video card HDMI for audio and doesn't detect my X-Fi so no audio unless I plug headphones directly into my monitor. In VM I had audio with it because it used Windows Direct Sound API.
 
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