Virtualbox hosts start with a black screen

New installation of Leap 15.6 as I’m upgrading from an AMD 5950x to a Threadripper 7960. After a new clean installation of Leap, I mounted my VM folder and VBox recognized all my VMs, but all of them (Win XP, Win 7, Win 10) attempt to start with a black screen with 100% core usage. There is no actual booting that takes place; the VM host window just appears with a black screen inside. The VM logs don’t show any errors. I created a new VM and the issue is the same with a new VM. So I’m at a loss at what the issue is and with no error in the logs to guide me. Has anyone had this issue?

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(never had the issue).

So, some questions for clarification:

  1. Does a “new installation of 15.6” mean, you were on 15.5 previously?
    Or you installed fresh because you upgraded your hardware, but using the original disk (and was also using 15.6) ?
  2. Somewhat related to part 2 of #1, are you using the same /home/user partition as previously?
  3. Is the version of VBox you’re using now the same as previously?
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This is a brand new machine, clean install, with new disks. However, some directories of my /home/user (such as the VM guests) are remotely mounted to a file server through sshfs so that I can access them from multiple machines. I did try to create a new VM that is directly inside my home directory and not remote, the result was the same.

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This reads like VirtualBox isn’t getting access to AMD-V on your new Threadripper system, so every VM shows a black screen and uses 100% CPU, with no logs produced. Check the UEFI BIOS and make sure that SVM is enabled in the CPU settings. Let us know how that goes.

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I had to disable “Enable Nested Paging” for the VMs to boot. Windows XP and 7 boot now, Win 10 just boot loops. I have no idea why nested paging doesn’t work on this machine. All relevant virtualization options are enabled in the bios and KVM/QEMU work perfectly but are not really good options for workstation work, I use a lot of USB hardware which I plug and unplug during testing and QEMU doesn’t really like that.

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