Virtualbox Monterey (MacOS 12.1) Guest Unstable - how to fix?

[ziffster]

Have Catalina installed on Virtualbox.  Work flawlessly. Even the sound works now (VB 6.1.30).  However, when that image is upgraded to Monterey via the official installer, the machine becomes unstable.  If you select 1 or 2 CPUs, it will generally boot OK, but kernel panics soon, anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour generally.  This leaves a "kernel panic" log inside the guest, but Virtualbox doesn't report any useful information in its own logs about the reset.  If, however, I choose 4 CPUs, I'm lucky to make it to a fully booted state.  More often than not, it will kernel panic before reaching the desktop, and if I do reach the desktop, it will kernel panic within a minute or so.

 

There is one newer VB release (6.1.32), but it doesn't fix the issue.  They don't want to help in the official forums and apparently their devs don't even test their builds against the latest MacOS release.

 

Any idea what could be wrong, and how to fix it?  Do I need some new ExtraDataItem magic in my vbox file?  I tried adding a <CpuIdTree> configuration that was suggested in web discussions of setting up a Monterey VM, but it didn't fix the problem.  My CPU is a desktop i5-8600K (Coffee Lake) if that's important.

[quenda]

Oh, brand new newbie here, but I know this one!  I hope you have not given up.

 

I had the same problem.  Solution is:

$ VBoxManage setextradata "VM_NAME" "VBoxInternal/TM/TSCMode" "RealTSCOffset"

 

(substitute your VM_NAME)

 

I found it here:

"the problem seems to be about TSC (Time Stamp Counter) emulation."

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/435574/monterey-vm-reboot-loop-and-kernel-panic-in-virtualbox-6-1-32-on-apple-host-har