Okay, so I have narrowed this down a bit. The issue is the kernel version on the HOST system, not the GUEST. I tested this by installing the package "linux-headers-5.0.0-23" on a Xubuntu 18.04 guest in VirtualBox using two different kernels on the host PC. I used the command "time sudo apt install linux-headers-5.0.0-23" to report the total time for the process to complete. Here is how long the package installation took when running on each host OS kernel, not counting package download time (it was already in the apt cache):
Kernel 4.17.19-generic (and earlier): 20 seconds Kernel 4.18-rc1-generic (and later): 8 minutes, 43 seconds Using kernel 4.18 or later is almost 23 times slower! I have not been able to find any possible reasons for this. I have already ruled out differences in I/O schedulers. I can also confirm this issue on both of my Linux systems, the details of which are listed below. Furthermore, unpacking kernel headers on the HOST system only takes a few seconds, and I haven't noticed any other regressions in hard disk performance. ** System #1 ** OS: KDE Neon 5.16 64-bit (Plasma Desktop 5.16.5, KDE Frameworks 5.61.0, Qt 5.12.3) Motherboard: ASRock X58 Extreme3 (Intel X58 chipset) CPU: Intel Core i7-990x Bloomfield (3.46 GHz hexa-core, Socket 1366) RAM: 12GB DDR3 Video: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC (GAMING ACX 2.0+?) w/ 6GB RAM (PCI Express) NVIDIA video driver: 430.40 ** My System ** OS: KDE Neon 5.16 64-bit (Plasma Desktop 5.16.5, KDE Frameworks 5.60.0, Qt 5.12.3) PC: HP Pavilion m6-1035dx CPU/GPU: AMD A10-4600M APU with Trinity [Radeon HD 7660G] Graphics (using xorg radeon driver) RAM: 8GB DDR3 800 MHz -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/947664 Title: Unpacking linux-headers unbelievably slow in Lubuntu Precise (Beta 1) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dpkg/+bug/947664/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs