VirtualBox and the 2011 MacBook Pro
I really like VirtualBox, unfortunately it doesn’t like my new MacBook Pro.
When I create a Ubuntu VM with VirtualBox 4.0.4 the install process runs at a snails pace. My 2009 MacBook has no such issues, whats going on?
I did a bit of searching and found an open ticket on the VirtualBox bug tracker. Apple updated OS X installs on new machines to use the 64-bit kernel by default. Unfortunately 64-bit support for OS X isn’t quite there in VirtualBox.
So what can you do if you find yourself in this situation? Well, you can either wait:
Today we released VirtualBox 4.0.6 but unfortunately it does NOT contain a fix for this problem yet. I want to apologize for that. There are some technical problems which have to be resolved. The next maintenance release should fix this annoying bug and we hope that this will NOT take another 8 weeks. Thanks for your understanding!
Or you can switch OS X back to the 32-bit kernel
sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture i386