Virtualbox Host greater than 5.2.20 has choppy sound in guest virtual machine

English Applications
#1

I surf the internet in a guest virtual linux machine so that I can replace the VM if a virus manages to download itself.

I noticed choppy sound after upgrades occurred.

After playing with every combination - I discovered that the 5.2.24 guest was not the problem - It was the host.

Apparently the update that Virtualbox did changed the sound timeout from 100ms to 250ms and that causes choppy output.

Reinstalling the host virtualbox 5.2.20 and locking it in zypper is the only fix as Opensuse wants to replace it as soon as it checks for updates.

This is a FYI.

Here is how to see what version is running on the host OpenSUSE.

# zypper se -si | grep virt
i+ | virtualbox                                   | package | 5.2.20-lp150.4.20.1                      | x86_64 | openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update 
i+ | virtualbox-host-kmp-default                  | package | 5.2.20_k4.12.14_lp150.12.22-lp150.4.20.1 | x86_64 | openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update 
i+ | virtualbox-qt                                | package | 5.2.20-lp150.4.20.1                      | x86_64 | openSUSE-Leap-15.0-Update
#
#2

Recommend reporting to Virtualbox in their Forums (or to the openSUSE bugzilla).

And, posts about virtualization technologies should generally be posted in the Virtualization forum.

TSU

#3

Since Virtualbox is an application to OpenSUSE, I put this in this discussion group as it is the application problem and not a virtualization problem - the reason was found in the VirtualBox forum discussions - Ironically the value for the audio seems to be being broken every other release of VirtualBox 6. It apparently has drifted into the OpenSUSE repos as well.

I thought this might help others that have noticed the choppy sound in VirtualBox for the last couple of months.