OSX El Capitan and Virtualbox

OSX El Capitan and Virtualbox has a little issue. If you’re one of the people who uses Filevault on your Mac then there appears to be an issue with Virtualbox. That being once Virtualbox is installed the boot time in El Capitan takes a long time, like 5 minutes plus.

This is due to some issue with OSX and the Virtualbox kernel modules that automatically load during the boot cycle. Thankfully there is a easy though less than elegant way of getting around this.

All you need to do is move the modules out of “/Library/Application Support/VirtualBox” and into a different location. This will stop OSX loading them during the boot cycle.

Before you can run Virtualbox you will need to load the modules. An easy way to do this is to automate it via a bash script, like the following:

#!/bin/bash
sudo kextload *.kext
virtualbox &

So now all you need to do to run Virtualbox is run this script instead of the normal desktop icon. The script runs Virtualbox after loading the required modules.