OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Virtualization
Very poor performance of ArcaOS on VirtualBox 7 on Intel Mac
Steven Levine:
--- Quote from: Leonardo on February 08, 2025, 02:15:04 am ---I also have very poor performance on MacOS (intel) with all versions od OS/2 since 2.0 up to arcaos 5.0.8. Now 5.1.0 traps with this screen
--- End quote ---
Leonardo,
Is the a fresh install of 5.1? If so check config.sys for a duplicate BASEDEV or DEVICE statement.
Steven Levine:
FWIW,
https://mantis.arcanoae.com/view.php?id=1081
reports the same issue panic, but possibly for a different driver.
jailbird:
I posted about this issue a year or two ago.
Try setting your Window Scale Factor to 100% in VirtualBox and see if that makes it faster (yes, it'll be tiny and hard to read). If so, the workaround is telling macOS to that VirtualBox isn't HiDPI aware and to have the OS itself do the window scaling, I found instructions at:
https://digiajay.com/2022/03/05/macos-monterey-virtualbox-slow-performance-issue/
For some reason, VirtualBox's own scaling is horribly slow on macOS, I'm not sure why. I never noticed it with other guest OSs, but for some reason when running a OS/2, eCS, or ArcaOS VM, it's horrible evident.
Sadly to say, the best experience I got was using Parallels, but that's pricey.
DavidR:
Hi Jailbird
Thank you for the reply. I was aware of the setting in the Info.plist that would make the app launch in non-retina mode. This then allows you to run the VM with 100% scaling. It's way too small normally to use 100% and you have to use 200% to give you the correct size when using a Retina display.
However if you make the suggested change and try to launch the Virtual Box VM under macOS Sonoma it refuses to start and complains about the app signature being broken. This doesn't happen with Monterey, so I thought I was stuck using the 200% setting with Sonoma.
BUT, I've just discovered that you can launch the app and pass an 'AppleMagnifiedMode' argument to open it in non-retina mode. This does work so I can launch a specific VirtualBox VM from the command line using:
open /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app --args -AppleMagnifiedMode YES -comment ArcaOS-Exp --startvm 2f3f6889-be25-42ba-a78a-83a4c6be3139 --no-startvm-errormsgbox
This does indeed seem to be little bit faster. Not hugely, but everything helps.
So, after playing with lots of settings, the configuration I'm now using is:
1920x1080 resolution, 65536 colours, 100% scaling, non-retina app mode
It is still too slow for comfort so I will continue to investigate and I might raise a ticket with the VirtualBox developers, but it is a bit more useable than it was.
Many thanks
David
Jack Beckman:
I too had very poor/unusable performance under VirtualBox on an Intel Mac Pro. I switched to Parallels for the VM and it runs fine, including sound (once you set the type of guest to Windows 3.1!). There are no extensions unfortunately but I can live with that.
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