FreeBSD as a guest in VBox on Apple Silicon

[paul beard]

I have been running FreeBSD as a guest OS on an x86 Mac but am looking to move it to an M1/Apple Silicon host. Having some teething troubles that are likely more to do with VirtualBox but maybe someone can enlighten me on some of this. 

What I am seeing is the Guest dropping all network access, in and outbound, as well as losing time sync during that time. I don't see any sleep commands for the Guest OS and I have turned off disk sleep in the Host (it's an SSD so I expect that did nothing). The VBox console stays active, I can type in it and response is instantaneous. Network connections that were timing out work after that. I am screensharing the mac desktop so networking for the Host seems fine. I have fiddled with the KeepAlive values in ssh but without any real expectations. No change there. 

I have opened a thread on the VirtualBox forums but maybe someone here has seen this. I really only have FreeBSD running a weblog (nginx/MySQL) and a postfix relay so I could conceivably put this on a raspberry pi or something, it's so light a load. The mac was bought for other purposes that make the old one redundant except for this. 

I can't find any sleep commands in VirtualBox so I don't know what's happening there. There is no display in the mac mini yet but I turned off display sleep anyway. 

Any VirtualBox experts out there? 

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Paul Beard / www.paulbeard.org/