Haiku crashes on VirtualBox

[milkowski]

Haiku OS (​http://haiku-os.org/) HD images provided on ​http://haikuhost.com/housestrain/ doesn't work properly after converting them to VDI images using vditool. System works well on both VMware and quemu, but on VirtualBox there's crash during boot sequence, that invokes internal kernel debugger.

[Sander van Leeuwen]

There are two or three major problems with their OS: 1) Very picky timing loop during boot (calculate_cpu_conversion_factor() in haiku/src/system/boot/platform/bios_ia32/cpu.cpp) 2) ss selector checks all over the place. As the ss rpl is one in VBox, it will take the wrong code path. 3) Peculiar lss instructions (perhaps never executed) with possible selectors that are not wide open

Correcting this is not trivial and with possible bad side effects, therefor I won't fix it. This OS doesn't warrant the necessary engineering effort required to get it running.

So there are two possible workaround:

• use VMX or AMD-V hardware virtualization (see manual for turning it on)
• Haiku should rewrite certain parts to be a bit more virtualization friendly

The fact that this OS works with VMWare and QEmu is not relevant, because they both use very different approaches.