Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome hangs on VirtualBox with 3D acceleration enabled
VirtualBox devs basically threw their hands up over 3D Acceleration with regards to X11 guests, as stated in this post from over 2 years ago: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/X11Guest3D
There are dozens of tickets created on the VirtualBox site, and all of them have gone ignored. Plenty of forum posts as well. The same reply has been given every time, the latest one I can find posted 3 weeks ago by one of the devs (michael):
I am afraid that there is currently no one on the team with enough free time to investigate this (and no sign that it will change in the foreseeable future). It should be something which interested users with skills in OpenGL programming in C should be able to track down and fix. Questions (technical ones) or patches welcome on the vbox-dev mailing list.
Going forward, the current consensus is that you have 4 options:
- Disable 3D Acceleration (easiest)
- Use any other desktop environment besides GNOME x11, such as GNOME Wayland or Unity
- Use any of the other virtualization products
- Contribute to the VirtualBox project yourself
Links: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=84198 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/15417 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17014 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17577 https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewforum.php?f=3
In Virtualbox, the guest OS only sees a virtual graphics adapter provided by the virtual machine software. Installing drivers on the host won't matter and you'll probably break the installation by attempting to do so. 3D acceleration only really matters if you require it for gaming or 3d software, etc.
The 6.0 version released in December 2018 has made significant progress with the addition of a new option under the "Display" menu's "Graphics Controller" dropdown. Select VMSVGA under this option to create a virtual SVGA controller and you should be good to go.
Learn more here!
I had the same problem but with: Windows 7 host with NVIDIA Quadro K2100M
After reading the following article: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/06/mesa-18-1-1-ubuntu-18-04-ppa
I decided to install it and check if 3D acceleration works. 3D is ON since then and working fine.