Ubuntu 14.04 is horrible in my virtual box.

J

jimh425

Gawd
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Jan 7, 2012
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Ubuntu 14.04 AMD64 Desktop is horrible in my virtual box. I've tried to find information, but does anyone know when a fix may be coming as part of the ubuntu install? I'm guessing sometime this fall.

Note: 12.04 is no issue. Upgrading doesn't make it better. I have installed the Virtual Guest Additions as well which at least got rid of the 640x480 issue.
 
14.04.1 was just released. Is it an Ubuntu issue or a VB problem?

What do you mean by "horrible"? More horrible than Ubuntu is when installed outside of VirtualBox?
 
I guess that was vague, sorry. I was running 14.04.1. I have no idea if VB needs to update or Ubuntu does, but 12.04 is fine.

I have many of the same issues that others have according to searches I've done. The performance is so bad that I have to wait for almost any update to anything Unity. The terminal font changed to some tiny value as well. After that, I just bailed and went back to 12.04. More ram doesn't help more cores doesn't help.

BTW, it works great on my fast systems.
 
You're running in VB. Are you sure you have the correct settings in bios to enable all of the features for the virtual box to benefit from the power of your processor and ram?
 
In general, bug reports consisting of "horrible" as the only descriptor are themselves "horrible."

I've not had any problems virtualizing 14.04 FWIW. Can you run it in a "Type-2" hypervisor or whatnot? E.g. something that has a shorter stack and has performance more similar to bare metal?
 
I gave more specifics in my additional posts. Like I said, 12.04 works fine in Virtual Box with the same settings. I know I'm not the only one that is having problems running 14.04.1 in VB. It's easy to find others that are having similar issues which is why I knew to update the virtual box additions. It doesn't look like they have a fix for all of the issues.

I was just wondering if anyone heard of some work toward addressing the rest of the issue. It doesn't seem so. That's not much of a problem for me. I'll just use 12.04 and give VB and Ubuntu more time to sort it out, and try again in a few months.
 
Virtualbox seems to be problematic in general. Last week I was battling with random network errors on my Macbook. Internet kept freezing all the time. I had changed internet providers just before so naturally I suspected either the connection or the new modem/router was bad.

No, turns out that virtualbox froze the whole networking for a few seconds periodically if the virtual network card was in 'bridge' mode. Switch to 'nat' and problems were gone. I was running that same virtual machine for over a year in bridge mode without problems. It seems the last vbox update introduced this new one.
 
What hardware? What is your host OS?

I run VBox under Linux MInt 13 with several Windows versions as Guest OSes and they all run fine with default settings (& MMIO enabled). 3D is the only thing missing.
 
Still don't know what your host system OS is, for instance. If it's also Ubuntu, consider a type-2 like KVM.
 
Again, I don't really need a solution at the moment since 12.04 still works. I have other systems including one that runs 14.04 natively.

In any case, the Host OS is Windows 8.1 on a Asus x202e with 4GB ram, i3, SSD drive. 12.04 and any other Ubuntu I've tried except for 14.04 has always been acceptable wrt performance.

You might also wonder why run VB with Ubuntu on this laptop...it's simple, I don't want to use Windows 8.1 all of the time, but I want the option to run Windows 8.1. Up to this point, I've never had any issues with VB that weren't cleared up by reinstalling VB and reinstalling whatever distro of Linux that I was using at the time.
 
Sometimes Windows will silently put VBox in "compatibility mode". I've found VBox works better in a Linux host, also not all Intel processors support VT-x.
 
Gave the VM 64MB for the video card, enabled 3d acceleration, turned on the guest extensions and it's just fine. (VirtualBox on a MBPr)
 
mwarps said:
Gave the VM 64MB for the video card, enabled 3d acceleration, turned on the guest extensions and it's just fine. (VirtualBox on a MBPr)
Click to expand...

Do you have a Haswell MBP? I'm getting comparatively horrible vbox performance with my top spec late 2013 MBP.
 
B00nie said:
Do you have a Haswell MBP? I'm getting comparatively horrible vbox performance with my top spec late 2013 MBP.
Click to expand...

Yep, it's a Haswell. 16GB, 512GB SSD, 2.8 i5.

My expectations are not of instant response or extreme perfomance, do note.
It works, and the mouse lag is noticeable but not bad by any means.

VM has 4GB and a 16GB VMDK and two cores.
 
mwarps said:
Yep, it's a Haswell. 16GB, 512GB SSD, 2.8 i5.

My expectations are not of instant response or extreme perfomance, do note.
It works, and the mouse lag is noticeable but not bad by any means.

VM has 4GB and a 16GB VMDK and two cores.
Click to expand...

The lag has something to do with video performance. For example even with guest additions installed, playing any sort of video on the linux guest totally freezes input usually. Adding cores seems to help a little but not a lot.

I have the 15" MBP with the 2,3Ghz i7, 16Gb and 512Gb SSD.
 
As mwarps already alluded to, it's likely a 3D compositing issue. If bumping up the guest's VRAM and enabling 3D acceleration doesn't work out, I might suggest XFCE or a similar desktop environment that doesn't require 3D acceleration.

What I'm pretty sure is happening is that the desktop environment is falling back to software mesa rendering for the 3D effects. Previous versions of Unity had a 2D only fallback mode.
 
fantabulous said:
As mwarps already alluded to, it's likely a 3D compositing issue. If bumping up the guest's VRAM and enabling 3D acceleration doesn't work out, I might suggest XFCE or a similar desktop environment that doesn't require 3D acceleration.

What I'm pretty sure is happening is that the desktop environment is falling back to software mesa rendering for the 3D effects. Previous versions of Unity had a 2D only fallback mode.
Click to expand...

I never run KDE or GNOME on virtual hosts Or Unity in any host for that matter.. It's not a 3D problem but a general graphics performance thing.
 
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