Haiku VirtualBox Guest Addition

I have a large screen and currently use the CustomVideoMode hack to let Haiku uses larger screen portion on my VirtualBox. But I found this hack is limited as I can’t increase the resolution bigger than a specific value. I search on the net and found Haiku used to have guest addition for VirtualBox but it’s incomplete. Is there any plan to revisit the VirtualBox Guest Addition problem? I hope someday I could use my native screen resolution with Haiku on VirtualBox.

Search on the use of VBoxManage®, can’t recall the exact binary atm, but should make VirtualBox ok to use your native resolution on you install (using it here myself, VBox in full-screen, in native resolution) :slight_smile:

Hmm which resolution do you use? I run 1920x1080 just fine here with the VESA custom rez…

My screen is 1680x1050.

With VboxManage I got 1600x900 on both laptops

And the trick doesn’t work?

VBoxManage setextradata "Whatever VM name" "CustomVideoMode1" "1680x1050x32"

Only work partially for me. I could increase the resolution but not to my native resolution. After a certain value it started to tearing and distort that the only thing I could do I power off the Haiku VM and roll back to my previous snapshot.

This worked for me (just re-did it on a new install)
~/VirtualBox VMs/Haiku 64bit$ VBoxManage setextradata “Haiku 64bit” “CustomVideoMode1” “1600x900x32”

Could be a bug… which arch did you install? which hrev?

I think it’s something about screen ratio. Did you notice both of you use screen ration of 16:9? My screen ratio is not 16:9.

R1/beta1. I’m still afraid of the RC so I will upgrade when R1/beta2 officially released.

This is my resolution for my laptops (one running W7, other one is running Ubuntu), for me it’s working

CustomVideoMode is arbitrary, isn’t it? Could you try to use a non 16:9 resolution and check if it work?

BTW, the VirtualBox Guest Addition is not only about video driver but I found it also make the mouse to be smoother (than when you don’t have VirtualBox Guest Addition installed) and it also adds the ability to mount shared folder on the guest os. I think it’s much better for Haiku to have full VirtualBox Guest Addition support or at least, we should have the video driver working other than relying on VESA.

Hmm, using hrev54253 here and it works fine with this resolution, so maybe the update will fix it indeed.

Replace the x32 by x16 to switch to 16 bits mode. It might solve your problem.

For the mouse, you can configure it to “tablet” mode in VirtualBox settings, no guest additions needed then.

The current version of VirtualBox is 6.1.10, and the Guest Additions package in HaikuDepot is at version 4.3.12, which means it won’t work at all with 6.x VBox.

Is there a release of the Guest Additions that will work with VBox 6.x?

Maybe if I get the time to sort up what others did in the current patchset wrt my own local patches… (shame VBox doesn’t use git, and git svn was broken last time I tried…)

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Seems git svn is still broken…

The mouse still slow and lagging. Proper VirtualBox video driver + mouse driver are definitely needed. Full VirtualBox Guest Addition (shared folder, kernel modules,…) could be too far away, but a VirtualBox video driver + a VirtualBox mouse driver are very reasonable to expect for.

Developers, please focus on this. VirtualBox is the most important platform for Haiku apart from real hardware because most of Haiku’s users are using it in VirtualBox.