I’m trying to use a Windows 11 VM on my Ubuntu 22.04 host. I have experience with this setup on desktops with AMD processors, and they work well. However, on my Framework 13 Intel 12th gen, the VM is unusably sluggish and unresponsive. In most instances, I have to force shutdown.
I’d like to work a little more remotely, so I’m trying to get this sorted. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Also, going into full-screen mode (CTRL + F) on the VM makes things much worse, and my input devices don’t work as expected if I switch back to the host until I shut down the VM.
Thanks in advance!
[ETA2]: I would say that the performance is always slow-ish, but just about every other boot becomes unresponsive.
Out of curiosity, any reason not to use kvm/libvirt rather than virtualbox? I have run windows VMs using kvm/libvirt on my 11th gen intel and they work fine.
Also, that seems like a lot of processors for the guest, but you know your needs better than i, so please don’t take this as anything more than an observation. How many does the host have?
I’m in a similar situation where I have to run a bunch of VMs for work.
First, it’s not quite fair to compare desktop CPUs (whether AMD or Intel) to laptop CPUs–the performance gap is quite large, especially when you are allocating so many virtual processors.
Also, you probably should have more physical RAM than 16GB, even if you are only allocating 8GB to your VM, so that your OS has a bit more for overhead.
As a test, I recommend taking the exact VM that you are having performance problems with and trying it out on various other machines. It should be fully portable. Try to test on other laptops. You will probably find that performance is terrible on every laptop you try, until you turn the allocated resources down a bit.
Under Linux, I only use virtualbox. It’s lighter, and you can run 4 VM’s in parallel before the host becomes sluggish. With VMWare, 2 was the limit, but it was also slowing down my host.
The last releases should also run Windows 11. I only have a Windows 10 License and I will do my bloody most to stay on it. Can’t stand commercials popping up on my desktop.
RE: kvm/libvirt vs VirtualBox: Not really. VirtualBox was the first I saw, and it worked well on my desktops, so I’ve just kept with that.
RE: Number of processors: I think this might be part of the issue. The i5-1240P is my first processor with performance and efficiency cores. It has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. VirtualBox allows me to allocate up to 24 processors (so two threads per core? Looking at the Intel product page, it looks like I should only have 16 total threads). I originally had this set lower, but I was getting even worse performance. I increased to 10 to hopefully have at least 1 or 2 performance cores go to the VM. Is there a way to tell VirtualBox to take half of the performance cores for the VM? I only need the VM to run MS Word and PowerPoint (and not even at the same time) + a browser with 2-4 tabs.
I’ll see if I can scare up another laptop or two to test it.
Do you know of any way to designate whether the VM should get a p- or e-core? I’m starting to suspect that is more of the issue, as it sometimes runs OK (slower than expected, but usable) and other times not at all. This isn’t something I’d have to deal with on my desktop processors.
I think the RAM is OK. I still have about 4 GB free for the host while the VM is running and the VM typically stays below 50% utilization. They both should have about 4 GB of overhead.
The way I got around having to deal with P and E cores is by choosing (desktop) CPUs that don’t have E-cores (i5-12400, various AMD CPUs).
I’ll have to deal with the same problem you’re dealing with as soon as I buy my next laptop or desktop with an Intel CPU.
I have a 12th Gen Intel Framework 13 running Debian testing. I followed this guide for my Windows 11 VM and it works well enough for me. I hope it helps you at least somewhat.