VirtualBox 5 exposes a setting called "Paravirtualization Interface" that can improve performance for some specific guest operating systems.
Is there a way to set this option in a Vagrantfile
?
And in general: Is there documentation on how to set the acceleration settings via the Vagrantfile?
Found it. VBoxManage
(the VirtualBox CLI tool) has an optional argument called --paravirtprovider
. You can add that to the vb.customize
call:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
config.vm.box = "ubuntu/trusty64"
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.customize [
"modifyvm", :id,
"--memory", "1024",
"--paravirtprovider", "kvm", # for linux guest
"--cpus", "2"
]
end
end
The other CPU settings are also available that way, vb.customize
accepts the same argument as VBoxManage
. Refer to VboxManage --help
to get a list of all the options.
My Vagrantfile did not have a vb.customize section (maybe the accepted answer uses older format (?)).
Based on https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/virtualbox/configuration.html and https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html (search for --nictype) the following worked for me. I did not need to set KVM explicitely, because I was on Linux and it was the default.
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
config.vm.box = "ubuntu/bionic64"
config.vm.hostname = "whatever"
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
vb.memory = "512"
vb.cpus = "2"
vb.default_nic_type = "virtio"
end
end
By setting this default_nic_type to virtio, not only the first NAT-ed NIC got this type, but also I defined a second NIC (not shown here) and it also got created as virtio (virtio-net in virtualbox settings GUI).