Semi-random Black and White squares instead of apps after update to guest additions 5.0.20 -> duplicate of #15417.

[dobesv]

I recently updated to 5.0.20 and then updated the guest additions to 5.0.20.

Host: Windows 10 Guest: Linux Mint Rosa 17.3 with "Cinnamon" Desktop

After rebooting and logging in, instead of seeing my desktop background and apps I saw a black area with a few white squares. At some point while experimenting I also saw two slightly purple colored squares in one corner.

The login screen works fine, however. The "task bar" or "start bar" also appears and sometimes I am able to right-click something on the task bar and get a menu that appears correctly, although it usually doesn't work.

If I resize the virtualbox window I can temporarily see the apps rendered correctly and then it goes away and shows some variation on the black and white pattern. The pattern seems to be consistent after a reboot although I didn't compare pixel for pixel.

Disabling 3D acceleration in the VirtualBox VM settings resolves the issue, but application performance is unbearable in this case.

[dobesv]

The VBox.log.3 seemed to have some error messages in it. I don't know VBox well enough to tell if those are "normal" errors or good clues.

[dobesv]

Reverting back to guest additions 5.0.16 doesn't fix this issue, although it may have helped.

Increasing video memory from 64MB to 128MB seems to have helped a little bit, but as soon as a I launch Chrome, the problem recurs.

[dobesv]

Reverting VirtualBox back to 5.0.16 doesn't fix the problem, either. So, I'm stumped.

[dobesv]

I re-upped to 5.0.20 for virtualbox and for the guest additions and the problem seems specific to Chrome. Disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome seems to resolve the issue.

So, this is probably a duplicate of some Chrome-related bug somewhere, sorry about that!

I have no idea why this appeared just today, perhaps chrome updated and lost a previous setting to disable hardware acceleration.

[Michael Thayer]

Duplicate of #15417.

Please see the wiki page regarding user contributions to X11 guest 3D support.