window height of the VirtualBox guest screen size

[marco-237]

In WM the screen size (height) of the guest window of VB keeps returning to a few pixels, which is really annoying. Is there a way of forcing the screen size in VB to a specific size?

It seems to be a bug in WM since other window managers don't show this behaviour.

Regards, Marco

[dmaciejak]

I had that issue long time ago but did not seeing it recently. Which windowmaker version and virtualbox version are you using ? What are the steps to reproduce the issue ?

[marco-237]

WindowMaker version is 0.95.9. VirtualBox version is 6.1.36. It happens every time the login screen of the client is shown. Then it flips to 640x3 (instead of 640x480). After logging in it flips to 1680x3 (instead of what I want 1680x1050). Every time I have to resize the screen to the size I want, because the height is too small to see anything. And everytime it flips back to the height of a few dpi. This behaviour is seen only in WindowMaker, not in other wm's. When logged in in the guest OS, and after a resize it stays that way, But after an automatic screen lock, it flips back to 640x3.

[dmaciejak]

I had that issue in the past when I was not installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions (the virtualbox-guest packages). But as you mentioned other WMs are working fine it may be a different issue on your side. I am currently using virtualbox 7.0.6 but I can try to replicate it on my side if you could also share with us what OS (linux?), distro and version you are using.

thanks, david

[marco-237]

OS is FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE

[dmaciejak]

Cannot reproduce the issue on my side. Here the tests I did: I installed a fresh FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE on my virtualbox v7.0.6 I installed the windowmaker maintainer release use .xinitrc to launch wmaker from there I tried to move/iconify/maximise/resize the virtualbox window, working well save and restore the virtualbox machine state, working well tests with and without the virtualbox-ose-additions package on the guest tests around changing x11 conf to use the vboxvideo or vesa tests with virtualbox settings video memory decreased *tests with virtualbox settings different graphic controllers

One thing to mention, seems that the windowmaker maintainer release is not compiled with randr support.

[marco-237]

In my case FreeBSD is the host OS and Kali Linux is the guest, but doesn't matter which guest OS I run. Only difference with here is that VB v7 isn't in FreeBSD yet so maybe that's the solution. I'll check the randr issue.

[marco-237]

Hmm I've just rebuilt WindowMaker with randr support but no diff. I'll try to update the VB port to the latest 6 version (6.1.42).

[marco-237]

With a newer VB (6.1.42) version it's better, but not ideal. The height flips now to 480 instead of 3. xprop shows: _NET_WM_ICON_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = XdndAware(ATOM) = BITMAP WM_NAME(STRING) = "Kali1 [Running] - Oracle VM VirtualBox" _NET_WM_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "Kali1 [Running] - Oracle VM VirtualBox" _MOTIF_WM_HINTS(_MOTIF_WM_HINTS) = 0x3, 0x3e, 0x7e, 0x0, 0x0 _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE(ATOM) = _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_NORMAL _XEMBED_INFO(_XEMBED_INFO) = 0x0, 0x1 WM_CLIENT_LEADER(WINDOW): window id # 0x1200008 WM_HINTS(WM_HINTS): Client accepts input or input focus: True window id # of group leader: 0x1200008 WM_CLIENT_MACHINE(STRING) = "yokozuna" _NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL) = 1748 _NET_WM_SYNC_REQUEST_COUNTER(CARDINAL) = 18874382 WM_CLASS(STRING) = "VirtualBox Machine", "VirtualBox Machine" WM_PROTOCOLS(ATOM): protocols WM_DELETE_WINDOW, WM_TAKE_FOCUS, _NET_WM_PING, _NET_WM_SYNC_REQUEST WM_NORMAL_HINTS(WM_SIZE_HINTS): user specified location: 1, 750 user specified size: 1680 by -35 program specified minimum size: 329 by 106 window gravity: Static

The "user specified size" shows negative height, which should be 1050. So there's still something broken.

[dmaciejak]

Good news I was able to reproduce the issue with VirtualBox version is 6.1.36. Bad news the issue is coming from VirtualBox itself. Seems a few tickets were opened on the VirtualBox side already like https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/15863

When debugging WindowMaker, we can see that VirtualBox is requesting to create the guest window with a wrong height size in my case (843x65508). When checking the property of that window with xprop, we can see:

WM_NORMAL_HINTS(WM_SIZE_HINTS):
                user specified location: 1, 563
                user specified size: 843 by -28
                program specified minimum size: 292 by 110
                window gravity: Static

The user specified size is so big that it's overflowing the max value as defined in X11, that's why it's displayed as a negative value.

On the WindowMaker side, an attempt some time ago was made to mitigate that issue and that's why you are getting a height of 480 pixels, that's basically the failsafe implemented for such case. See https://repo.or.cz/wmaker-crm.git?a=commit;h=6668715402a5d8e2ecda6702076a06bf8988721e I will most probably provide a better patch in the coming days to cover more corner cases, but nothing much can be done.

[marco-237]

Yeah this is what I'm seeing too. Thanks for the effort! But where is the extreme "user specified size" coming from?

[dmaciejak]

From VirtualBox itself when it's creating the guest window, it's sending to the wm the size request ..