Quick Review of Icaros on VirtualBox

[vidarh]

@MarkTime - speed

VirtualBox works entremly well if you have virtualization in CPU and it works extremly poor without it. I have Phenom II 550 and AROS runs at "native" speed under VirtualBox there.

Yeah, that's quite likely to be the biggest problem.

@MarkTime:

A solution worth trying: Install the files into a directory instead, and download the Linux-hosted version of AROS, copy boot/aros-unix into the boot directory under where you put the files, and start that instead. That's what I've done with my Icaros setup, since the CPU on my laptop doesn't support hardware virtualization.

[vidarh]

Yes, my Opteron 256 machine is an older machine, and doesn't support Virtualization - but why exactly is that important here?  That just means you won't get dual core support, but its not like Icaros needed another core.

If the CPU doesn't have virtualization extensions Virtualbox needs to do para-virtualization, which involves one or more of a variety of hacks to trap and emulate any attempts by the OS use privileged instructions for example. It adds a tremendous amount of overhead whether or not the OS in question makes much use of the various functionality.