Can't run WSL (2) on a Windows 10 VM running in VirtualBox on host macos Big Sur

I just upgraded a new MacBook Pro from Catalina to Big Sur and found VMWare Fusion was no longer working very well (random network problems, and performance problems leading to timeouts), so I installed Virtual Box.

The performance is fine, but I can't use wsl/ubuntu after following the manual installation procedure as documented at

PS C:\Users\User> wsl --list -v NAME STATE VERSION * Ubuntu Stopped 2
PS C:\Users\User> wsl echo hello
Please enable the Virtual Machine Platform Windows feature and ensure virtualization is enabled in the BIOS.
For information please visit 

I restarted LxssManager (which was running), and that didn't help.

For the VBox machine settings, I haveVT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging, and Hyper-V Paravirtualization enabled

Any suggestions?

This seems like a fairly generic situation. To recap: Host: macOS 11.5.1 (Big Sur) Hypervisor: Virtual Box 6.1.22 VM: Windows 10 VM (version 2106)

And the problem is: WSL is installed with an Ubuntu subsystem, but can't be run.

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