17.10/wayland causing flashes in virtualbox

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

just as a quick response:

I've installed the new 17.10 Desktop for testing in a virtual machine (VirtualBox 5.1.20 running on MacOS), and while it installed smoothly and booted instantly, there's a problem with the graphics (probably related to wayland): Especially when moving the mouse or starting new programs the screen flashes white every few seconds or sometimes shows just a blank grey screen for about a second. Not suited for regular work.

But I have no clue which component precisely is causing that problem.

regards

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Upgrading to the latest VirtualBox release 5.2.0 does not help.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

installing virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils and virtualbox-guest-x11 solves the problem, but then Xorg is running instead of wayland.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

Please try to install virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils without the guest-x11 package, and report back

[Michael Thayer (michael-thayer)]

Are you talking about the guest screen or the host screen flashing? And are you sure that X11 is running after installing those packages? In a terminal in the guest run "ps -Af | grep X" and see if Xwayland is in the list.

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

I have removed just guest-x11, and then it runs wayland again, but the flashes and these off-seconds are back as well. The problem seems to be directly related to wayland.

I am not familiar with wayland yet, first contact. But when installing virtualbox-guest-x11 and rebooting, the process Xwayland is absent and Xorg is present.

And it's just the guest screen, just that particular window the VM is running in.

If I don't touch mouse and keyboard, it happens only occasionally, every 5 or 10 seconds, but once I move the mouse or start a new program opening it's own window, it happens more often and in most cases immediately.

It looks like some syncing problem between virtualbox and wayland.

[Speedo (speedogoo)]

Same here with the final release of 17.10 on macOS 10.13. Log out and choose Ubuntu on Xorg and no more flickering. More discussion on https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=85110.

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

Yep, we got the same issue, not sure what wayland is doing, but probably this is the issue (quoting upstream)

fun: Wayland crashes if you open and close a laptop lid too fast. This is apparently not a bug but a design error in the protocol.
And it has been causing me endless fun over the past week.
https://phabricator.freedesktop.org/T7722
And likely to play havoc with VirtualBox dynamic resizing:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788908

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Note that "Wayland" is not a display server. Wayland is just a protocol that apps can use to talk to any compatible display server.

The product you're using is "gnome-shell", and the offending component is possibly "mutter" if not "gnome-shell".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-shell - 3.26.1-0ubuntu6

---------------
gnome-shell (3.26.1-0ubuntu6) bionic; urgency=medium

  * Upstream-proposed fix for lid close crash with wayland and virtualbox.
    (wayland is behaving badly with vbox dynamic resizing)
    (LP: #1724810)

 -- Gianfranco Costamagna <email address hidden> Tue, 31 Oct 2017 08:55:10 +0100

[Mikko Hurskainen (mikko-6)]

Experienced this after fresh install of 17.10 with Virtualbox .30. Guest additions + Ubuntu sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade removed the problem.

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

This does definitely not "remove the problem" here.

As said before, installing all guest additions makes the ubuntu guest run X11 instead of wayland, it then just looks as if the problem had gone. This might help in terms of usability, but not if you want to use and test wayland (e.g. to prepare for 18.04) .

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

This is fixed in bionic with 5.2.2-3 version (69989.patch).

I don't plan to fix artful, that will go EOL soon, and has an older vbox.
If somebody wants to test a fix, feel free to do it.

In the meanwhile I uploaded the fix in my ppa
https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/virtualbox-ppa

[Ben Mishkanian (fusiongate200)]

Is it possible to implement the fix in the upstream gnome-shell? It seems Fedora's gnome-shell is also affected by this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1520005

[DanglingPointer (ferncasado)]

Just stating here that it currently affects 18.04 and 19.04 as guests on Vbox 6 on Macos (Mac Pro 2018).

Flickering white screen happens only with Wayland and not X.
X works fine.

Guest additions installed as well.
VBox extensions installed as well.