VirtaulBox Install: Slow Performance

Hello Arch Community:

I have a newly installed Arch system on my VirtualBox VM machine and it seems to be a bit laggy in performance. I am seeing the following things:

  1. Applications freeze and I am unable to move between Windows in the Plasma GUI.
  2. When using Konqueror, this seem to cause the system to lag. Is this a recommended browser? Seeing other weird things as wells where I cannot use the enter key to launch a URL in the browser. Enter key works fine for other applications.

I have not added any other software to my system, basically followed the latest Arch Install guide and choose the Plasma GUI.

I am running by VirtualBox on a Hackintosh w/ a 8 core 3.6 8 Core Intel w/ 64 GB of RAM, so I am good hardware wise.

I have dedicated 32 GB of memory and 1 CPU core. What is the recommendation here? 2, 3, 4 Cores?
Would also like to know why the enter key does not work on the Konqueror browser.
Thanks for any suggestions.

I am not familiar with the disadvantages of running a Hackintosh, does virtualization work well on a Hackintosh or in order to get MacOS running on a non Mac are there some tricks involved that may impact the ability to use the Virtualization of the CPU. Here is a list of things you could explore:

  1. Definitely, try upping the core count of the virtual machine. Since you have 8 I wonder what would happen if you used 4 for the VM?

  2. What are the programs you are trying to use on Arch? You mentioned using a web browser, which these days is one of the most memory and CPU intense applications that we use on our computers. Are you trying to do other CPU intensive tasks like games, video editing, and other things like that? If you aren’t able to pass the video rendering to an external GPU through some sort of pass through technology that might be too much for just your CPU to handle especially with just one core. Depending on what programs you are trying to use, some graphic and CPU intensive programs are going to run better on bear metal than in a VM.

  3. Do you have vitalization turned on in your computer’s BIOS? Some computers require you to turn on virtualization in your BIOS. I’m guessing that you do have yours turned on because I’m guessing that Virtual Box wouldn’t run at all without this turned on, but it might be worth checking your BIOS settings.

It could just be #1, which is probably the easiest change to make and try out.

Thanks for the feedback. My BIOS setting for “Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O” is disabled as a recommendation to installing macOS in on my “hack”. I will play around with CPU settings and see if that helps. I am thinking I might just need to build a dedicated Arch box