GNOME Boxes problems - 3D acceleration, poor graphics performance and xml configs being overwritten

Applications
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Hi all. Forgive me if I’ve structured this incorrectly, or in the wrong place. Did my best to try and get it right, but I’m new here.

Anyway. I’m having a bunch of problems with GNOME Boxes VMs.

I’m using Fedora 36 with GNOME Wayland as the host, trying to run Ubuntu, Manjaro, Pop_OS and Fedora guests (all running GNOME desktop). Host has an i5-8250 and Intel UHD graphics 620 with a 3000x 2000 display. 8 CPU cores and 3-4GB ram assigned to each VM. Boxes version 42.3.

The big issue is that I’m finding that graphical performance is really bad, in any guest VMs 1080p Youtube videos, for example, are extremely choppy and often out of sync with the audio. Moving windows lag behind the cursor, and any sort of interactive graphical website its basically unusable. If I disable 3D acceleration, it’s even worse (ie unusable) .

spice-vdagent is installed in all guests and I’ve tried running them in both X11 and Wayland - The ubuntu guests particularly dont like running in Wayland and crash often, the Fedora guest on Wayland, on the other hand, seems to do best of the lot (but still quite bad). Lowering resolution from the native 3000x2000 seems to help a little, but not much. Changing CPU cores or RAM on the guests seems to have no effect.

I’ve been toying with options in the xml config in Preferences > Resources > Edit Configuration, trying to fix this ( incidentally, this seems to be the only way to enable 3d Acceleration in Ubuntu guests - theres no toggle in the Preferences menu like normal).

In doing so, I’ve also noticed something else weird: my changes to the XML config file are applied successfully on the VM if I start it immediately after editing, but the config xml gets overwritten and reset if I close GNOME Boxes, and re-open it. Which means every time I want to start a VM, I have to manually re-configure the XML, which is a real pain.

Has anyone else had these problems? I don’t know if the XML-reset is expected behaviour, but the laggy graphical performance in the guests can’t be normal - Virtualbox runs them smooth as.

Thanks very much

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These are likely bugs in Boxes/virt-stack and we can discuss them on the gitlab issues that you opened.

Please be aware that it isn’t reasonable to demand an answer to your issues in less than a day or two. I work alone in GNOME Boxes and it isn’t my work priority at the moment, so I will get to it when I can.

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Um… I didn’t ‘demand’ anything. I didn’t mention timeframes. I didn’t even ask you to take time out of your schedule or …anything.

I literally just asked “Has anyone else seen this behavior”…

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Sure, no problem. I said this because you posted your issue in three different places.

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Yes I posted this here because someone else on GNOME Issues told me off, and said I was supposed to ask questions here instead. Which apparently i shouldnt have done? O rshould have asked it on the page for a different projects I dont even recognise?

I’m really just confused now.

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no worries, let’s discuss the issues separately in each gitlab issue. Sorry for the confusion.

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