Virtualbox: problem after last update (solved)

Spanik · l33t Joined: 12 Dec 2003 Posts: 953 Location: Belgium

I have a virtual Windows XP that I use for an old single 3D cad program. It is more than sufficient for the use I make of it, designing some railway model stuff for myself. This virtual machine has already moved 3 pc's and several installs without issues. I use the same VM on my desktop and my laptop. Both have a NVidia graphics card and I use the Nouveau driver on both.

But since the last update to 5.15.80 I have a problem. And I cannot even determine where the problem lies. I can start the VM, start the application, open files etc. But when I want to draw a line, then I can select the needed tools I click for the start point but no line comes on the screen. And when I close the drawing it just closes, so that line has not been created in the application otherwise it would ask to save the change.

When I draw a line in "Paint" it does work. So the mouse clicks are transferred ok.

This happens identically on both the laptop and the desktop (they are at the same update kernel 5.15.80)

On the laptop I started kernel 5.15.69. When I start it there, I can draw a single line, then the application crashes and if I restart it, I get the same symptom then with the last update.

But I have no idea where to search now. Is it in the kernel, Virtualbox, the Virtualbox additions or a driver issue? Just starting an older kernel doesn't work, but then each time there is a new kernel I have to rebuild the Virtualbox modules with:

RayDude

Spanik · l33t Joined: 12 Dec 2003 Posts: 953 Location: Belgium

After a try to update to unstable 7.0.2-r1, I found that indeed my virtualbox-extensions were still 6.1.21. Update made no difference.

But while searching I found that in 6.1.40 there are more people having issues with "mouse drag" and that is where my problem also is situated. I need to mouse drag to draw. Some people found it is solved when you change the "pointer device" to "PS/2 mouse" instead of the "USB tablet" default. And for me that solved it.

Do you have a good link for that qemu/libVirt setup?
_________________
Expert in non-working solutions

RayDude · Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2022 5:40 pm Post subject:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/QEMU

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Libvirt

If you google those two terms you will find a lot of howtos.

If you want to run windows native-ish on a separate video card, you want to use something called VFIO. I have this working on my laptop. I use AMDGPU for linux and the RTX 3060 mobile for windows. It games at nearly full speed.

Use virt-manager GUI as your setup process. Once you figure out how to create a disk file (or assign a specific SSD to windows if you have two), then it's a very similar setup to virtualbox.

https://www.tecmint.com/create-virtual-machines-in-kvm-using-virt-manager/

https://gist.github.com/gorkawien/95418da089f9f0d2d48b075bc04d5afc

I haven't looked at any of the above. I don't remember what guide I used, it was quite a while ago.

It took me a few tries to get the hang of it.

Remember to make a backup of everything important from your virtualbox VM regularly, because when virtualbox breaks hard (like it did for me) you can lose stuff (I did).
_________________
Some day there will only be free software.