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« on: March 09, 2019, 09:23:14 pm »
Valery,
vboxsdl.exe, which you suggested, runs much better than virtualbox.exe. On my machine it will restore a saved VM running Windows XP in 2 to 4 seconds. Wow. Faster than virtualPC on Windows 7 running on the same CPU and motherboard. And I like the user interface better: you don't have all the extra menus and icons - just the VM and a title bar. Much closer to seamless.
There are still a couple of small issues:
1) sometimes I have to run the command
vboxsdl --startvm "WindowsXP_Pro"
twice to get the vbox to start. Very rarely three times. But I don't have to wait between tries - or rather waiting between tries doesn't seem to make any difference from executing the command immediately.
When vboxsdl doesn't start the error returned is:
fatal error: RTR3Init: VERR_INVALID_CPU_ID
2) If I need to run Firefox and vboxsdl at the same time, I have to start vbox first. If firefox is already running vboxsdl will not start. This is true no matter what the setting is for virtualAddressLimit. And after shutting down firefox I have to wait about 10 seconds before vboxsdl will start.
And - though this really isn't an issue, since the vboxsdl user interface is so minimal there is no option for saving the state of the vm when shutting down the vm. You have to do that using vboxmanage, e.g.
vboxmanage controlvm "WindowsXP_Pro" savestate
But since I use a CMD file to start vbox, it is no big deal to use a CMD file to shut down the VM and save its state. If I want to turn off the VM PC I just close the VM window.
Using vboxsdl to run a VM I would rate vbox on OS/2 as better than virtualPC xp mode on Windows 7. Vboxsdl starts faster than virtualPC/xp mode, shuts down/saves its state at least as fast, and the performance inside the VM is at least a good or better than Windows 7/VPC . Plus, from my experience, vbox is more reliable. There is the multiple tries to get vboxsdl to run hiccup on OS/2, but Windows 7/VPC/xp mode also has its issues. I have had xpmode just stop working on two difference Windows 7 machines. The only fix was to reinstall virtual PC.
Thanks for the suggestion to run vboxsdl, and for your work on vbox.