Small display of guest Ubuntu in VirtualBox

Question

I'm running Ubuntu Bionic Beaver inside VirtualBox with Arch Linux 5.3.12 as the host operating system.

I've selected the default options while going through VirtualBox' "Create Virtual Machine" dialog.

I've installed guest additions using pacman -Sy virtualbox-guest-utils.

This is what I see:

Ubuntu doesn't fill the available space and it doesn't adapt its size when resizing the VirtualBox window.

How can I make Ubuntu inside VirtualBox use all that empty space?

Answer 1

Select VBoxSVGA as the graphics controller

You can fix this by selecting VBoxSVGA in the VM's settings. Go to "Display" → "Screen" → "Graphics Controller":

This way you get a guest operating system that fills the whole window:

The default graphics controller for Linux guests is VMSVGA. Here's an explanation of the different graphics controllers.