OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Virtualization

Very poor performance of ArcaOS on VirtualBox 7 on Intel Mac

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DavidR:
Hi All

I've enjoyed reading the posts on this forum for a good while now but never needed to ask anything - until now.

I've been happily using ArcaOS 5.0 in a VM using VirtualBox on macOS (Intel) for many years and have gradually upgraded it to 5.0.8. It has worked fine using either the official VirtualBox additions or the alternative ones from Netlabs version 5.0.51 r218 - I think these are referred to as "Valery's".

After upgrading to macOS 14 Sonoma, I was forced to move to VirtualBox 7 due to the way the new macOS version handles kernel extensions and virtualisation. In doing this the performance of the ArcaOS VM plummeted. It is virtually unusable and no end of tweaking configuration settings seems to fix it. It might be a graphics problem because it is particularly slow when moving windows around or when command prompt boxes scroll. But just in general everything is very, very slow. So I am not sure.

The same VM without any changes running on an earlier macOS version with VirtualBox 6 works just fine.

I have avoided VMWare in the past for this since it was not supposed to have as good integration with OS/2 as VirtualBox, however I have installed the latest version and did a fresh install of ArcaOS 5.0.8. To my surprise it is running much faster than VirtualBox does - and has very, very acceptable performance. (Whereas a similar fresh install on VirtualBox is still very slow.) However the only VMWare Tools that I can find are from https://github.com/wwiv/os2-guest/releases/. These work well, but only provide mouse/pointer integration and clipboard synchronisation. This is a great start, but not as good as what VirtualBox provides, especially custom resolutions and shared folders.

So my questions to the kind people on this forum would be:

1) Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? And if so does anyone know how to get the performance back in VirtualBox 7?

2) Does anyone know where I can get better VMWare Tools? Ones that would also have the shared folder function? While watching the recordings of the last Warpstock presentations, I vaguely recall someone mention that they had access to some VMWare tools? Do you know if/where I coud find those to try out? Or maybe they are the same ones I am using ...

I hope I don't have to give up on running ArcaOS on my Mac, but it is becoming increasingly difficult. Any help greatly appreciated!

Thanks
David

Roderick Klein:
Configure the VM to run with 1 CPU core, if it does not run with one CPU core already.

Roderick Klein

Paul Smedley:

--- Quote from: Roderick Klein on February 01, 2025, 08:44:43 pm ---Configure the VM to run with 1 CPU core, if it does not run with one CPU core already.

--- End quote ---

Sorry, but this is bad advice. Modern virtualbox allows ArcaOS to run just fine in SMP mode with multiple cores.

KO Myung-Hun:
In my cases, setting CPU count to 1 increased performance. More CPUs than 1 decreased performance to 5x to 10x, especially when using autotools and cmake and so on.

KO Myung-Hun:
@DavidR Check if your hardware virtualization is activated. You can check if a turtle() or a V() is on the status line for this. And if moving mouse cursor over it, you can see the detailed status for virtualizaiton.

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