Re: [gentoo-user] VirtualBox question on Thinkpad laptop

[Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>]

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On Saturday, 20 August 2022 07:30:01 BST Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Long-story-short; I run ArcaOS (backwards compatable OS/2 successor)
> as a guest on QEMU on my desktop.  The Lenovo Thinkpad has the "vmx" cpu
> flag, so QEMU is theoretically doable.  But the mouse is extremely
> flakey, to the point of unusability, under QEMU on the Thinkpad.  I've
> tried various tweaks, but no luck.  I "asked Mr. Google", but only found
> other people with the same problem... and no solution.

I've noticed the same problem with a MSWindows VM on a laptop, but only when 
the screen resolution for the VM is anything other than full screen on the 
host.  The starting ritual to rectify this involves pressing Esc repeatedly as 
Tianocore screen starts to come up, then select 'Reset', which resizes the 
Tianocore window and when the MSWindows VM starts I use Ctrl+Alt+F to enter 
full screen mode.  If I don't do this the VM window is small(er), the 
resolution will not resize to full screen even when the window is maximised 
and the mouse is sticky/jumpy and its real position displaced on the guest's 
screen - I have to guess where it will actually land before I click on 
anything.  Other OS VM guests, e.g. Linux, *BSDs, Android, etc. do not exhibit 
this problem.


>   Plan B) According to the ARCA NOAE website
> https://www.arcanoae.com/wiki/arcaos/installation-planning/virtual-machine-c
> onfiguration/oracle-vm-virtualbox/ ArcaOs can be installed in a VirtualBox
> VM, masquarading as OS/2 (I did say it was backwards compatable).
> 
>   Are there any booby-traps to watch out for?  What I'm most concerned
> about is the default "qt5" USE flag.  Is VirtualBox usable without the
> qt5 GUI?

I use the Qt5 GUI on VBox which offers a very user friendly management 
interface.  However, recently I am not able to boot MSWindows OSs.  I think, 
but I'm not sure, some recent kernel settings have hardened (Spectre_v2?) and 
it seems the MSWindows OS requires access to the host which is no longer 
allowed.   VBox complains about AHCI driver corruption, kernel and system 
problems and gets into a loop of trying to auto-correct whatever has the 
problem - but fails.  I haven't tried reverting kernel settings to see if the 
MSWindows VM will be able to run normally again.  I'd be interested to find out 
if there are any workarounds to get these VBox VMs to run again, but haven't 
had time to look into it.

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