I have installed an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS virtual machine into VirtualBox running on
Windows 11 host. This is on an Intel Alder Lake CPU with separate
performance/efficient cores (2 P-cores with HyperThreading, 8 E-cores). I gave
it 12 virtual cores. Already when installing the operating system, I saw that
the installer program was poorly responsive and the sound that the installer
played during startup was breaking.
After installation, the Wayland graphical user interface works well when no
CPUs have load, but whenever I put some load on the CPUs like make -j12 on a
big software project, the keyboard responsivity becomes very poor. For example,
when typing ls -aFl it often interprets it as ls -Afl or even ls _afl so
the position of the shift moves. It takes a second or two for the ls -aFl (or
ls -Afl or ls _afl) to appear when under load.
Switching Wayland to X11 solves the problem that the position of the shift key
was incorrect, but still the command I type takes a second or two to appear if
under CPU load. So responsivity was still unacceptable.
Any kind of multimedia playing fails instantly, I can’t play music without the
audio breaking.
I tested VMWare and it doesn’t have any of VirtualBox’s responsivity problems.
However, VMWare’s support for two screens is not adequate for me (I can only
get two screens if in full-screen mode, and the control bar of VMWare goes over
the VM contents, and the only way to make the control bar disappear is
capturing the mouse which requires separate uncapturing if I want to move to a
window on the third screen that has my web browser running under Windows).
At first, I thought the cause for poor performance would be the separate
P/E-cores, and that the E-cores would be horribly slow and for some reason
threads would get scheduled on them
(https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=108745 has this problem).
However, later I found that on the lower right corner of VirtualBox’s icons,
there was a green turtle icon as opposed to blue motherboard icon. Then I found
this: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=99390
So VirtualBox is falling back to software virtualization because virtualization
in hardware is not present. I tried every trick in this thread, including:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off(although I couldn’t do the full
power cycle since I can’t remove the laptop battery)DISM /Online /Disable-Feature:Microsoft-Hyper-V- I put Enabled to 0 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, Control, DeviceGuard, Scenarios, SystemGuard.
- I put EnableVirtualizationBaseSecurity and EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity just in case there was a typo to 0 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, SYSTEM, CurrentControlSet, Control, DeviceGuard.
- I set Memory Integrity to Off
- I checked BIOS settings, disabling Secure Boot and some features that seemed to offer additional security by using virtualization
…but I couldn’t get the green turtle away, even after reboots. msinfo32.exe
showed that virtualization-based security was still in use.
Naturally, I did check that virtualization was enabled in BIOS settings.
How can I remove the green turtle and get VirtualBox to use Intel’s CPU-based
virtualization technology?
