Screen goes black at end of boot unless safe mode is selected when Haiku is a guest under VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.10

[Don Quixote]

Hot Damn, I finally got VirtualBox to boot Haiku off my USB stick! That will allow me to build to a partition on the stick, then boot my MacBook Pro off that same partition. Once I got the USB drive working, VirtualBox otherwise seems to work a lot better than Linux QEMU KVM.

I am running Haiku hrev42888 that I built myself.

$ uname -a
Linux frylock 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:50:42 UTC 2011 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

$ apt-show-versions virtualbox
virtualbox/oneiric uptodate 4.1.2-dfsg-1ubuntu1

VirtualBox does not allow one to select different video card models in the GUI as can be done with virt-manager with Linux QEMU KVM. The only options are the amount of video RAM (6 MB in my case), 2D accelleration (disabled) and 3D accelleration (disabled).

When safe mode is not used, the screen goes completely black at the end of boot, however Haiku has not crashed as evidenced by serial port output appearing now and then.

I finally got video by selecting both safe mode and video safe mode. I will try each one individually and will add a comment to narrow down the problem.

I thought at first the problem was somehow due to booting off my USB stick, but I think now that some recent change to VirtualBox that is in Ubuntu 11.10 but not 11.04 must have caused the problem.

The host is a Core Duo (32-bit, not Core 2 Duo) Apple MacBook Pro, Model Identifier MacBookPro1,1.

I get the black screen with and without IO Apic, and with the USB stick being mapped to either an SATA or IDE drive as seen from the Haiku guest.

[Don Quixote]

Serial debug output with USB stick mapped to SATA drive

[Don Quixote]

Serial debug output with USB stick mapped to IDE drive

[Don Quixote]

VirtualBox VMDK physical disk configuration file, mapped to USB stick on /dev/sdb

[Don Quixote]

VirtualBox Haiku guest XML configuration file

[Don Quixote]

The problem I had with getting VirtualBox to use a physical USB stick as a drive for the guest was that I did not have permission to read or write /dev/sdb on Linux. I needed to add my user to the vboxusers group, "chgrp vboxusers /dev/sdb" then re-create the virtual drive VMDK file.

Also after adding myself to the vboxusers group I needed to log out and back in again.

[Don Quixote]

it seems to be necessary to select both fail-safe video mode in the Haiku boot menu, as well as to select the fail-safe video options. I succeeded with 32-bit 1024x768.

If I used the default fail-safe video I always got the black screen at end of boot.

IO APIC enabled or disabled in the VirtualBox guest configuration does not seem to matter.

[Don Quixote]

Enabling or disabling both VT-x and Nested Paging does not seem to matter.

I got a bunch of ATA errors while running svn update on the buildtools source tree when I presented my USB stick to the Haiku guest as an ATA drive. I will report that as a separate bug. I'm trying SATA now.

checkfs runs quite a lot faster when all of IO APIC, VT-X and Nested Paging are enabled, and the drive is configured as SATA.

[Don Quixote]

The fastest VirtualBox guest config so far: IO Apic, VT-x and Nested Paging enabled, SATA storage

[luroh]

Likely fixed by now, please reopen if problem persists.