VM machines are much slower on Linux Mint than on WIndows 10

VirtualBox
1

Hi!

I have the latest Whonix-Gateway and Whonix-Workstation VMs on an SSD, which is connected to my PC via USB3.0 ports. Also I use and upgrate/update them frequently, so the systems are up to date. My problem is, that I have two different host operating systems and the mentioned VMs behave differently on Windows 10 x64 and on Linux Mint x64.

On Windows 10, booting up the VMs are pretty fast, some seconds maybe. Working inside the VM is also fast, no problem here. The problem starts when I use the same VMs on Linux Mint x64.
The VM settings are the same of course, I have nothing installed and running on the Mint host OS. USB 3.0 drivers are also installed (in the kernel). But booting up the VMs are 6-8x slower on Linux Mint. It means, that e.g.: on Windows the Workstation boots up in 10 seconds maybe, but on Linux it takes 60-80 seconds. Also the file handling is much slower inside the workstation if I use Linux Mint as host.

What I tried so far:

  • Update Virtualbox to the latest version
  • Use ICH9 chipset for workstation instead of PIIX3 (no difference in speed)
  • Add more resources (nonsense, it works like a charm on Windows 10)
  • Download a fresh copy of the Whonix set and upgrade/update to the latest version. Then after that copy files over from the old VM to the new VM, but after the file transfer the new VM also gets to be very slow.

Maybe it’s not Whonix specific problem, but have you experienced such problem? How could I solve this?

2

That all sounds very much unspecific to Whonix because of:

Worth trying:

(Whonix is based on Kicksecure.)

3

Maybe its your video driver(s)?
Linux in general video drivers and video acceleration used by VirtualBox, by default, barely work at best.

Check what driver you are using on your host, and what kind of graphics card you have. Try switching drivers to newer/open source variants then reboot and retry?

it could also happen if you have iGPU and dedicated GPU running on same machine and they getting mixed up by linux

In my experience slowness in Whonix always was due graphics weirdness

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