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

[Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net>]

On 8/20/22 12:30 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> Long-story-short; I run ArcaOS (backwards compatable OS/2 successor) 
> as a guest on QEMU on my desktop.

Aside:  Is ArcaOS really a different version of OS/2?  Or is it still 
4.x with patches and updated drivers?  I saw extremely little 
difference, other than eye candy / included open source packages, 
between IBM OS/2 Warp 4.5x, eComm Server, and ArcaOS.

Further Aside:  I run anything in the above to be able to drive my 
P/390-E PCI card.

> 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.

This sounds extremely reminiscent of guest OS driver / utility 
integration, or rather the lack there of, when running OS/2 et al. in VM.

> 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've not fond much effective difference in the various hyper visors, 
save for driver / guest OS additions / integration maturity level. 
Sure, different hyper visors have varying maturity levels of the 
management utilities.  But I've gotten all of them to do what I want.  I 
prefer VirtualBox on stand alone workstation for lab / play thing and 
VMware's (free) ESXi on my server for things I want running months at a 
time (read: to continue running when I reboot my workstation to change 
kernels).

I assume that since you're running ArcaOS, that you have support from 
Arca Noae.  As such, I'd open a support ticket with them and ask about 
guest add-ons for various hyper visors.

I don't know the current state of 3rd party guest add-ons for OS/2 / eCS 
/ ArcaOS under VirtualBox.  Hopefully they've improved since the last 
time I looked.

Surprisingly enough, I think the best integration that I ever saw was 
under an *OLD* version of Microsoft's Virtual PC / Virtual Server / 
Hyper-V.  Back when they still supported OS/2 as a guest OS in an 
official capacity.  Perhaps you can run an old version thereof or 
extract the guest add-ons therefrom and use them elsewhere.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die