VirtualBox 3D Acceleration

[Patrick]

I am not sure I will be able to fix this.

Please also ask in VirtualBox forums as per The User Co-developer Concept. Hopefully they have any idea.

Also anyone could try to contact Oracle (developers of VirtualBox) and pay them to find a solution. Once a solution is found I will consider applying it by default in Whonix.

Videos work for me either way. I never used 3D acceleration. Therefore I wouldn’t even know how to distinguish 3D acceleration working versus 3D acceleration broken. Fast vs slow isn’t a measurement - unless it is obvious - which I don’t have any slowness issue to begin with.

Can you run this command in the different situations that you described

• 3D acceleration disabled (Debian buster VM)
• 3D acceleration enabled and working (Debian buster VM)

and see any difference?

glxinfo | grep -i OpenGL

@AnonymousUser

Something kernel-related in the VM? Can we recompile it somehow to make it work?

Nothing special about Whonix kernel by default yet. We’re working on kernel recompilation but nothing one would use without knowing it. I.e. if you used it, you’d know it. Default Debian buster linux kernel. Nothing special. Therefore recompile kernel won’t make any difference since non-Whonix, Debian buster does not have this issue either as you said (which uses exactly the same kernel).

@AnonymousUser

This now results in a limitation of Whonix OVAs. VMSVGA 3D accel doesn’t work in them. I have tried latest 15.0.0.7.1 OVA and both Gateway and Workstation can’t get past a black boot screen with a frozen white cursor in the top left-hand corner.

You could try serial console. Try it first with non-broken Whonix. Then switch the option that breaks it. Hope that serial console is still functional. Might help to gather debug information.