HAIKU Beta Nightly VM very slow

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Hi all, Loving the look of this project so far! I tried Haiku when the first alpha was released in 2012 and was very keen on this project.

I’ve been using the Beta 1 nightly (64bit) HAIKU in VirtualBox for about a week now and I’ve been having random app crashes (particularly HaikuDepot and WebPositive). This may in fact have nothing to to with the OS but I cannot understand why this is as I have allocated up to 8GB of ram and 4 CPU cores for the system to run on, and my internet connection is stable. I also have no other applications running on my machine while using virtualbox but this shouldn’t matter as my laptop is the latest i7 with 16GB ram.

More specifically about the app crashes, I was attempting to install LibreOffice through Haiku Depot and this failed at least 4 times in HaikuDepot after the application froze and could not be killed (issuing kill command in a root terminal) I did eventually get LibreOffice installed using pkgman in the terminal. The installation is also up to date and synced.

So I guess my question is: is this a known virtualbox issue or is this perhaps user error?

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It might be Haiku not liking 4 cores in the VM try it with just one… it should run fine with one core. Also you really don’t need more than 4GB unless you intend to develop in it. Haiku freshly booted only uses around 200MB (used to be a bit less but it went up with package management).

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WebPositive is rather crashy, indeed. HaikuDepot isn’t usually, so that seems a tad odd.

VirtualBox is rather unstable w.r.t. disk access, especially with more than 1 core. Are you on Windows or Linux? On Linux it’s much better to use KVM.

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I’m on windows (unfortunately) but will try to reduce the settings to 1 core and only 4GB of ram and see if that helps. I suppose I thought that “more is better” but stranger things have happened. Will update once I get a moment to edit these settings.

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Frozen apps during network activity sound like you’re using default PCnet network card in VirtualBox which is known to have issues. Did you switch it to Intel PRO/1000 in VM settings? See here https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/virtualizing/virtualbox/#part_trouble

You can also try VMware, Haiku works noticeably faster there (at least on my hardware).

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Thanks,
changing the cores to 1 and lowering the ram has stopped random crashes.
Also changing the network settings fixed the issues with crashes during HaikuDepot package installations.
2 thumbs up!

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