VirtualBox: Host OS processor is spiked while guest OS virtual processor is idle?

Posted by Greg Mattes on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Greg Mattes
Published on 2009-09-16T15:51:25Z Indexed on 2010/03/22 11:01 UTC
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virtualization

I'm running Windows XP 32-bit on Windows Vista 64-bit with VirtualBox 3.0.6. Whenever I run the XP VM, Vista (host) reports 100% cpu utilization even though XP (guest) reports between 1-5% cpu utilization.

The host box has 2 GB of physical RAM. The guest/vm is configured with 512 MB. The host box has a 64-bit AMD processor.

No apps (other than VirtualBox) are running on either host, they're just idling.

Any guesses as to why the host processor is spiked?

I've enabled various advanced features for the XP guest in the hopes of having better performance:

Settings → System → Motherboard: Enable IO APIC
Settings → System → Processor: Enable PAE/NX
Settings → System → Acceleration: Enable VT-x/AMD-V and Enable Nesting Paging

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