SSDR v1.4 on A Mac using VitualBox issue

Peter · March 2015

Ah!, hit a road bump!!

Radio: Flex6300

Scenario #2
Hardware: MacBookPro 15'', Mac OS =Yosemite, RAN 8 Gig, 250Gig SD HD
Software: Windows 8.1 running in VirtualBox for Mac.

The installation of SmartSDR v1.4 when fine, all components installed on a clean computer no other software installed.

The Problem:
1. When SmartSDr 1.4 is started, no slice is displayed and there is some latency when loading.
2. When the slice is activated (still not very fast loading), all of the network antenna bars are green (I am sitting right next to my wireless router.)
2. After about one minute of a slice being up, remote selected and no audio it dies with the "The connection to the radio was lost. Please reconnect" message.
4. I connected the laptop directly to the LAN and still encountered the reconnect message.

Note: This is currently working on a stand alone Win8.1 system connected directly to my LAN.

Any thoughts ?

Peter

George KF2T · March 2015

I'm using a Mac with Parallels very successfully. Dont know much about Virtual Box, but suggest checking network settings, firewall settings, and the amount of RAM allocated to the VM. My setup uses a bridging network connection, 512Mb video RAM, and 8 Gb RAM for Win8.1. I suspect 4 Gb would be fine. What else is running on your system at the same time?

Peter · March 2015

No much is running on the host system and nothing except for the Flex software on the VM. I have assigned 4 of the 8 gigs to the VM and is using a bridge network connection for the wireless. I wonder if it makes a difference that I have SSDR remote also setup on another computer though not active....NAH!, that should not make a diff!

Peter

George KF2T · March 2015

It does sound like a system resources issue. Check both the Mac and VM activity monitors to see if there's something hogging it up. You can probably remove any antivirus, etc, from the VM. Also tweak the VM for highest performance (cut out all the graphics enhancements).

Walt - KZ1F · March 2015

Peter, Had you been running 1.3.8 in the same environment? Or is this a new test environment created for such a purpose?

While I can speak authoritatively on KVM I cannot do so on VirtualBox. However, in the case of VMWare and even KVM, unless you are using the PV drivers network traffic is slowed down. What happens in the fully virtualized environment is the OS in the VM thinks it is actually talking to a NIC, which it isn't, it's a virtualized NIC in software. So rather than have interrupts drive things they have timing loops etc. It might be, as George alludes to, Parallels does a better job of using PV drivers. Is it VMWare Fusion their Mac virtual environment? In the case of VMWare you need to load the current VMWare Tools to bring in some of the PV drivers. What PV (Para Virtualization) does is replace the fully virtualized drivers with drivers that know they aren't in a real hardware environment and can work with the hypervisor directly to minimize the IO latency. But again, if you used the identical environment for 1.3.8, then what I just described is not the issue.

Walt

SSDR v1.4 on A Mac using VitualBox issue

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