VirtualBox Guest Additions for Windows Guest - No HD Resolution

Hi folks,

I’ve been hitting my head against a wall for a few days trying to get a Windows Guest VM properly working in Manjaro.

I started in VirtualBox, briefly stopped at VMWare Player but performance was so poor couldn’t use it and came back to VirtualBox. The issue is I’m unable to set 1920x1080 resolution to the guest.

Initially I failed installing the Guest Additions to the Guest - Found the answer in one of the forums that solved it (Run in compatability mode for Win7 and disabled the 3D acceleration).

So after the Guest additions successfully installed I’m still getting an issue with the device driver - In the Device Manager i get the yellow exclamation mark with “Windows cannot initialzie the device driver for this hardware (code 37)”.
This leaves me at a maximum resolution of 1600x1200.
I’ve tried different tips I found for suggesting Hints to the Virtual Box display but was unsuccessful.

I’m running on a Lenovo T460s with dual graphics card (intel and Nvidia).
Also a Disclaimer - I’ve only been running Linux for a couple of weeks and was solely on Windows Machines until now so bare with me :slight_smile:

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

This looks like it’s rather a Windows problem than a Manjaro problem.

You can play around in the VirtualBox container settings with which device should be used and how much GPU memory it’s giving to the guest.

Hi,

What do you mean a windows problem? You mean something with the VirtualBox configuration right?

Both the onboard Intel graphics and the Nvidia card should be fije with delivering 1920x1080 res.

I’m guessing the issue with the graphics driver installed by the guest additions is what’s restricting the resolution but I’m not sure what is causing the problem…

I’m pretty sure you cannot (and have not) configured GPU passthrough.
I know it is possible with kvm/libvirt/virt-manager, with the right hardware.

Normally, in a virtual machine, everything is virtualized - the name kinda gives it away. :wink:
This means, an OS running in a VM doesn’t use the drivers for your actual hardware
but the drivers for the virtualized hardware.
Meaning: you only have a virtual graphics card.
Inside a VM, the drivers for your actual hardware will do nothing for you.
You are limited to what the drivers for the virtualized hardware can do.
… but they can probably do what you want - you just might not have found how to set it up yet

Thanks I actually ended up already with Qemu/KVM. Still ironing out some rough edges but solved the resolution issue :slight_smile:

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