Nov 03, 2014  In my eyes, an ideal solution to run older Mac software that requires Rosetta, would be using an OS X 10.6 Server guest for that purpose. But unfortunately OS X guests in Fusion don't support Quartz Extreme and other graphic acceleration (unlike their Windows counterparts), so that many applications (e.g. ILife, iWork) won't run.

The Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions contain experimental hardware 3D support for Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris guests.

With this feature, if an application inside your virtual machine uses 3D features through the OpenGL or Direct3D 8/9 programming interfaces, instead of emulating them in software, which would be slow, Oracle VM VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's 3D hardware. This works for all supported host platforms, provided that your host operating system can make use of your accelerated 3D hardware in the first place.

The 3D acceleration feature currently has the following preconditions:

• It is only available for certain Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris guests. In particular:

  • 3D acceleration with Windows guests requires Windows 2000 or later. Apart from on Windows 2000 guests, both OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9 are supported on an experimental basis.

  • OpenGL on Linux requires kernel 2.6.27 or later, as well as X.org server version 1.5 or later. Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 14 have been tested and confirmed as working.

  • OpenGL on Oracle Solaris guests requires X.org server version 1.5 or later.

• The Guest Additions must be installed.

  For the basic Direct3D acceleration to work in a Windows Guest, Oracle VM VirtualBox needs to replace Windows system files in the virtual machine. As a result, the Guest Additions installation program offers Direct3D acceleration as an option that must be explicitly enabled. Also, you must install the Guest Additions in Safe Mode. This does not apply to the WDDM Direct3D video driver available for Windows Vista and later. See Known Limitations for details.

• Because 3D support is still experimental at this time, it is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the VM settings. See Section 3.6, “Display Settings”.

  Untrusted guest systems should not be allowed to use the 3D acceleration features of Oracle VM VirtualBox, just as untrusted host software should not be allowed to use 3D acceleration. Drivers for 3D hardware are generally too complex to be made properly secure and any software which is allowed to access them may be able to compromise the operating system running them. In addition, enabling 3D acceleration gives the guest direct access to a large body of additional program code in the Oracle VM VirtualBox host process which it might conceivably be able to use to crash the virtual machine.

To enable Aero theme support, the Oracle VM VirtualBox WDDM video driver must be installed, which is available with the Guest Additions installation. The WDDM driver is not installed by default for Vista and Windows 7 guests and must be manually selected in the Guest Additions installer by clicking No in the Would You Like to Install Basic Direct3D Support dialog displayed when the Direct3D feature is selected.

The Aero theme is not enabled by default on Windows. See your Windows platform documentation for details of how to enable the Aero theme.

Technically, Oracle VM VirtualBox implements 3D acceleration by installing an additional hardware 3D driver inside the guest when the Guest Additions are installed. This driver acts as a hardware 3D driver and reports to the guest operating system that the virtual hardware is capable of 3D hardware acceleration. When an application in the guest then requests hardware acceleration through the OpenGL or Direct3D programming interfaces, these are sent to the host through a special communication tunnel implemented by Oracle VM VirtualBox. The host then performs the requested 3D operation using the host's programming interfaces.

The Oracle VM VirtualBox Guest Additions contain experimental hardware 2D video acceleration support for Windows guests.

With this feature, if an application such as a video player inside your Windows VM uses 2D video overlays to play a movie clip, then Oracle VM VirtualBox will attempt to use your host's video acceleration hardware instead of performing overlay stretching and color conversion in software, which would be slow. This currently works for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X host platforms, provided that your host operating system can make use of 2D video acceleration in the first place.

Virtualbox Macos Catalina Guest Additions

Hardware 2D video acceleration currently has the following preconditions:

• Only available for Windows guests, running Windows XP or later.

• Guest Additions must be installed.

• Because 2D support is still experimental at this time, it is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the VM settings. See Section 3.6, “Display Settings”.

Technically, Oracle VM VirtualBox implements this by exposing video overlay DirectDraw capabilities in the Guest Additions video driver. The driver sends all overlay commands to the host through a special communication tunnel implemented by Oracle VM VirtualBox. On the host side, OpenGL is then used to implement color space transformation and scaling.

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The following section describes known problems with this release of Oracle VM VirtualBox. Unless marked otherwise, these issues are planned to be fixed in later releases.

Gpu Acceleration Virtualbox For Macos Guest House

• The following Guest SMP (multiprocessor) limitations exist:

  • Poor performance with 32-bit guests on AMD CPUs. This affects mainly Windows and Oracle Solaris guests, but possibly also some Linux kernel revisions. Partially solved for 32-bit Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 guests. Requires the Guest Additions to be installed.

  • Poor performance with 32-bit guests on certain Intel CPU models that do not include virtual APIC hardware optimization support. This affects mainly Windows and Oracle Solaris guests, but possibly also some Linux kernel revisions. Partially solved for 32-bit Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 guests. Requires the Guest Additions to be installed.

• NX (no execute, data execution prevention) only works for guests running on 64-bit hosts and requires that hardware virtualization be enabled.

• Guest control. On Windows guests, a process started using the guest control execute support will not be able to display a graphical user interface unless the user account under which it is running is currently logged in and has a desktop session.

  Also, to use accounts without or with an empty password, the guest's group policy must be changed. To do so, open the group policy editor on the command line by typing gpedit.msc, open the key Computer ConfigurationWindows SettingsSecurity SettingsLocal PoliciesSecurity Options and change the value of Accounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only to Disabled.

• Compacting virtual disk images is limited to VDI files. The VBoxManage modifymedium --compact command is currently only implemented for VDI files. At the moment the only way to optimize the size of a virtual disk images in other formats, such as VMDK or VHD, is to clone the image and then use the cloned image in the VM configuration.

• OVF import/export:

  • OVF localization, with multiple languages in a single OVF file, is not yet supported.

  • Some OVF sections like StartupSection, DeploymentOptionSection, and InstallSection are ignored.

  • OVF environment documents, including their property sections and appliance configuration with ISO images, are not yet supported.

  • Remote files using HTTP or other mechanisms are not yet supported.

• Neither scale mode nor seamless mode work correctly with guests using OpenGL 3D features, such as with Compiz-enabled window managers.

• The RDP server in the Oracle VM VirtualBox extension pack supports only audio streams in format 22.05kHz stereo 16-bit. If the RDP client requests any other audio format there will be no audio.

• Preserving the aspect ratio in scale mode works only on Windows hosts and on Mac OS X hosts.

• On Mac OS X hosts, the following features are not yet implemented:

  • Numlock emulation

  • CPU frequency metric

  • Memory ballooning

• Mac OS X guests:

  • Mac OS X guests can only run on a certain host hardware. For details about license and host hardware limitations. See Section 3.1.1, “Mac OS X Guests” and check the Apple software license conditions.

  • Oracle VM VirtualBox does not provide Guest Additions for Mac OS X at this time.

  • The graphics resolution currently defaults to 1024x768 as Mac OS X falls back to the built-in EFI display support. See Section 3.14.1, “Video Modes in EFI” for more information on how to change EFI video modes.

  • Mac OS X guests only work with one CPU assigned to the VM. Support for SMP will be provided in a future release.

  • Depending on your system and version of Mac OS X, you might experience guest hangs after some time. This can be fixed by turning off energy saving. Set the timeout to 'Never' in the system preferences.

  • By default, the Oracle VM VirtualBox EFI enables debug output of the Mac OS X kernel to help you diagnose boot problems. Note that there is a lot of output and not all errors are fatal. They would also show when using a physical Apple Macintosh computer. You can turn off these messages by using the following command:

    To revert to the previous behavior, use the following command:

  • It is currently not possible to start a Mac OS X guest in safe mode by specifying the -x option in VBoxInternal2/EfiBootArgs extradata.

• Oracle Solaris hosts:

  • USB support on Oracle Solaris hosts requires Oracle Solaris 11 version snv_124 or later. Webcams and other isochronous devices are known to have poor performance.

  • Host Webcam passthrough is restricted to 640x480 frames at 20 frames per second due to limitations in the Oracle Solaris V4L2 API. This may be addressed in a future Oracle Solaris release.

  • No ACPI information, such as battery status or power source, is reported to the guest.

  • No support for using wireless adapters with bridged networking.

  • Crossbow-based bridged networking on Oracle Solaris 11 hosts does not work directly with aggregate links. However, you can use dladm to manually create a VNIC over the aggregate link and use that with a VM. This limitation does not exist in Oracle Solaris 11u1 build 17 and later.

• Neither virtio nor Intel PRO/1000 drivers for Windows XP guests support segmentation offloading. Therefore Windows XP guests have slower transmission rates comparing to other guest types. Refer to MS Knowledge base article 842264 for additional information.

• Guest Additions for OS/2. Seamless windows and automatic guest resizing will probably never be implemented due to inherent limitations of the OS/2 graphics system.

• Some guest operating systems predating ATAPI CD-ROMs may exhibit long delays or entirely fail to boot in certain configurations. This is most likely to happen when an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM exists alone on a primary or secondary IDE channel.

  Affected operating systems are MS OS/2 1.21: fails to boot with an error message referencing COUNTRY.SYS and MS OS/2 1.3: long boot delays. To avoid such problems, disable the emulated IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM. The guest OS cannot use this device, anyway.