one particular aspect of VirtualBox has pissed me off in recent days. the system-level debugger is complete trash; it totally fails to do even simple things like inserting working breakpoints. at one point I had to resort to dropping int 3s into my code wherever I thought I might eventually want a breakpoint, and even that doesn't work most of the time.

so I gave up on VirtualBox and switched to QEMU, which works significantly better.