Solved EFI: VirtualBox computer non-stop after successful shutdown of FreeBSD

For me: no virtual computer with EFI enabled will stop, after shutdown of the operating system, where the OS is FreeBSD.

Does anyone know of a workaround?

I can't find a related bug report, or discussion, in any VirtualBox-specific area.

Posted to #vbox, with reference to this topic:

… please, is anyone familiar with the symptom?



An example screen recording (looping GIF):

2022-04-18 08-03 VirtualBox, EFI, computer non-stop after shutdown of FreeBSD.gif

– as far as I can tell, without attempting to analyse the VirtualBox log, the guest OS (FreeBSD 13.1-RC3) behaves properly.
 

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  • FreeBSD 13.1-releng, KDE Plasma 2022-04-18 08.03.log.txt
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For me: no virtual computer with EFI enabled will stop, after shutdown of the operating system, where the OS is FreeBSD.

Does anyone know of a workaround?

Set in the VM's "Settings -> System -> Motherboard -> Chipset: ICH9" (instead of PIIX3).

I can't find a ... discussion, in any VirtualBox-specific area.
Understandable when not found. With proper keywords used for search the result would have been:
The /sbin/poweroff command doesn't seem to work properly when EFI is enabled. poweroff gets stuck at "uhub0: detached":
That seems to be a bug, but a resolvable one. Choose in Settings -> System -> Motherboard -> Chipset: ICH9 (instead of PIIX3).
 
is ICH9 also of benefit where FreeBSD boots without EFI in VirtualBox?
There are benefits (I didn't verified them with FreeBSD as guest or host). The following text are excerpts from the VirtualBox user manual:

3.5.1. Motherboard Tab
Chipset: You can select which chipset will be presented to the virtual machine. PIIX3 is the default chipset for most guests. For some guest OSes such as Mac OS X, the PIIX3 chipset is not well supported. As a result, Oracle VM VirtualBox supports an emulation of the ICH9 chipset, which supports PCI express, three PCI buses, PCI-to-PCI bridges and Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI). This enables modern OSes to address more PCI devices and no longer requires IRQ sharing. Using the ICH9 chipset it is also possible to configure up to 36 network cards, compared to a maximum of eight network adapters with PIIX3. Note that ICH9 support is experimental and not recommended for guest OSes which do not require it.

And regarding to configure up to 8 (PIIX3) or 36 (ICH9) network cards:

3.9. Network Settings
... , Oracle VM VirtualBox is extremely flexible in how it can virtualize networking. It supports many virtual network cards per virtual machine. The first four virtual network cards can be configured in detail in the VirtualBox Manager window. Additional network cards can be configured using the VBoxManage command.
 
Thanks. For what I do with FreeBSD guests, I'll probably err on the side of caution and use ICH9 only where EFI is enabled.
 
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