Virtual box performance poor on 26H2 windows running a Linux VM.

Hi folks
At least download and install of Virtual Box is far better than the convoluted VmWare player / workstation process these days but the performance is very poor.

I know you shoulnd't compare with HYPER-V or on a LINUX Host using KVM/QEMU but it's a bit painful especially on a decent i7 laptop with 32 GB RAM etc.

I only also want a minimal Linux system (no GUI needed) so I can access Linux disks from my entire LAN. It DOES work but I'm sure there must be options to speed this up -- ideas anyone.

Cheers
jimbo

this is how i have my Ubuntu setup in Virtualbox




its running very well setup this way.

ps. my bad i didn't read the 'headless' bit. my apologies.
best of luck Steve ..

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks
At least download and install of Virtual Box is far better than the convoluted VmWare player / workstation process these days but the performance is very poor.

I know you shoulnd't compare with HYPER-V or on a LINUX Host using KVM/QEMU but it's a bit painful especially on a decent i7 laptop with 32 GB RAM etc.

I only also want a minimal Linux system (no GUI needed) so I can access Linux disks from my entire LAN. It DOES work but I'm sure there must be options to speed this up -- ideas anyone.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

What are you asking?

Are you saying 26H2 performance is worse than 25H2

As a direct comparison, I have provided benchmarks for HyperV on Windows versis VB on Windows and in general Hyper is roughly twice as fast as VB.

Unfortunately HyperV has limitations (main one being no sound) if guest csn only run in basic mode, forcing VB to be the virtual machine of choice for most non Windows guests)

Unless you have evidence that there is something wrong specifically with 26H2, then I cannot see any meaningful solution to your issue.

Your question re. minimal Linux is unclear as well. Are you talking about it being run in 26H2 VB VM? Is your question even related to question about 26H2 performance?

cereberus said:

What are you asking?

Are you saying 26H2 performance is worse than 25H2

As a direct comparison, I have provided benchmarks for HyperV on Windows versis VB on Windows and in general Hyper is roughly twice as fast as VB.

Unfortunately HyperV has limitations (main one being no sound) if guest csn only run in basic mode, forcing VB to be the virtual machine of choice for most non Windows guests)

Unless you have evidence that there is something wrong specifically with 26H2, then I cannot see any meaningful solution to your issue.

Your question re. minimal Linux is unclear as well. Are you talking about it being run in 26H2 VB VM? Is your question even related to question about 26H2 performance?

Click to expand...

No problems with HYPER-V running on Windows Host with any type of VM. My issue is creating a basic Linux VM on Virtual Box on 26H2 (physical Windows laptop, i7 8 core 32 GB RAM 1 GB NvME internal HDD) it ran as slow as molasses -- OK I didn't expect HYPER-V performance but this was the pits. I've no issues with 26H2 experimental build currently - I also tried creating a Windows 11 PRO 25H2 beta -- also ran as slow as molasses.

I'm not sure if the issue with VBOX and Windows is that I have HYPER-V and the WSL both installed on the HOST Windows system . I was prepared for some loss of efficiency as with VBOX it was easy to dynamically attach / detach disks as well as other non disk usb devices.

By a minimal Linux I mean that itis a basic command line version (no GuI needed) with just the services running that enable disks to be shared across a network (local and remote), plus things like ftp, ssh, rsync, crontab-for timed auto commands, samba and access to media streams and other multi-media files for remote playing on Windows / other OS's and also disk storage for receiving client backups.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi

I may well be misunderstanding this, but I thought SAMBA/CIFS was a way to share.
Vague memories of a Raspberry and W10 being joined at the hip, so to speak.

It's quite possible that VirtualBox is not yet optimised to run on Windows 11 26H2 (or to intall/run 26H2 Guests) as the developers (Oracle's Development Team) do not chase compatibility with 'Beta' version of any operating system; i.e. for Windows 11 that means there is no 'official support' claimed for any Insider builds and nor do their Deveopment Team accept bug reports against running on a 'beta OS'. To put that another way if sutch builds work then fine , but no 'bugs'/problems will be actively investigated until after the final OS version release.

The VirtualBox Guidance put it this way:

Supported Host Systems include "Window 11 (64-bit) Released Versions only". VMWare is very similar and in both cases these Hypervisors invariably need to be updated before either will claim support for a 'newer' Windows/Lunux/macOS release than the currently supported release.

As OP has stated, performance is just as poor on 25H2 as 26H2 thus this is not related to Windows version.

At one time, type 2 hypervisor vms would not run if a type 1 hypervisor was active.

However the hyperV hypervisor was updated to include APIs that allow VB to run even if the type one hypervisor was active. However this is very inefficient making type 2 vms very slow.

Some improvements were made to the APIs which helped but still slow compared with HyperV.

You can still use the old boot entry trick where you have two boot entries for the host OS.

One boot entry disables the type 1 hypervisor and vb runs much faster but you cannot run vb.

The other enables the type 1 hypervisor snd then hyperv works but vb is slow.

See this post. It is quite old but still works today even with W11.

Microsoft 'admits' in its own guidance that both the Hyper-V OS Virtualisation Platform and also the underpinning Windows hypervisor platform which powers VBS are incompatible (by their design) with third party Type 2 Hypervisors that need direct access to VT-x/AMD-V support, and that those who wish to run a third party sofware need to disable not only Hyper-V Virtualisation, if it is installed, but also those VBS features that rely on the Windows hypervisor platform (Device Guard & Credential Guard). The API provided by Microsoft does allow/support some mitigation of the impact of an active Microsoft Hyper-V and/or Windows hypervisor presence, but does not provide a complete solution for third-party developers.

Unfortunately, users of VMware and VirtualBox have frequently reported that whilst using the known BCDEdit commands to enable/disable (toggle) Hyper-V do still work, they have no impact on the VBS features. These can be disabled in the Security Settings but most users affected seem to find it easier to download/use the Microsoft DGReadiness Tool to take care of disabling VBS features.

Ironically, in my own case, VirtualBox performance on Microsoft Surface (Intel and Qualcomm XElite) devices does not appear to be noticeably affected by active Hyper-V/VBS features and my VMs launch/run Windows 10/11 and the software I use every bit as quickly as native Windows installations; and the macOS Hypervisor on 'M' Series Silicon Apple Macs (my main use case) seems to have no negative impact on VirtualBox/VMware performance so perhaps Apple has done a better job of supporting third party software developers/users in this use case, although its nowhere near as good on the maintenance of backwards compatibility.