[zwp]

Is that due to SPECTRE & Meltdown mitigations?

[jart]

I disable Spectre mitigations on my Linux workstation since it doesn't host VMs or browsers. I'm sure if those were enabled it'd go much slower. But either way it's pretty clear that a lot of stuff got added to the kernel since 2.6.18 that slows down process launches dramatically, then some of it probably got optimized, and the rest stuck. Would be interesting to know what it is.

[loeg]

You should be able to disable them for your VM guests, but I don’t know if VirtualBox does.