WARNING: Virtualizing Haiku on old Intel CPUs is really slow (a lot slower than on their AMD equivalents), as it was reported on Reddit (Source). This post is written mainly for slow AMD CPUs, not for slow Intel ones. Sorry!
Thanks to victroniko for reporting this
VirtualBox should be more than enough for any of your virtualizing needs on a relatively slow machine. At least it worked on mine (see My PC specs below).
I did a little 3-step followup-guide for the main, official one.
- Follow the Virtualizing Haiku in VirtualBox guide
- When in already installed Haiku, open the “VirtualMemory” in “Deskbar → Preferences”
- Uncheck the “Automatic swap management” option and do a swapfile sized like your VM’s RAM or even double it
The steps 2 and 3 should prevent your Haiku from freezing when doing some bigger actions than staring at your desktop. At least it prevented that in my case, which you can check below and compare to yours.
Original post
Hello.
I wanted to begin my C++ development path on Haiku, starting with writing easy patches to the apps and some external programs for it (gladly there’s a tutorial for this). But there’s an issue: my PC is slow. And virtualization of graphic interfaces is commonly a hard operation for CPU/GPU.
I tested my PC with virtualizing minimal Debian on QEMU, and it seems to work pretty fine. However, it only had console, no xorg or anything.
Is there any recommended way of doing Haiku VM on relatively slow machine? Or, if there’s no official way, can you give some recommendations and advice? Maybe some QEMU settings you run Haiku on? Maybe I even shouldn’t use QEMU and there’s something more lightweight? Thanks in advance.
My PC specs:
- Xubuntu running on 250gb SSD
- 4gb RAM (+8gb SWAP)
- CPU is AMD Athlon II X4 640 (4) @ 3.00
- GPU is Micro-Star MSI N210 Geforce (NVIDIA GeForce 210)
- other specs will be added if needed
My Haiku VM config:
- Base Memory is 1536mb
- Video Memory is 48mb
- VDI max size is 4gb (more than enough)
- SWAP is 1gb (just random choice)
- everything else is default or described in the official guide, see above