FreeBSD as a guest in VBox on Apple Silicon

I have been running FreeBSD as a guest OS on an x86 Mac but am looking to
move it to an M1/Apple Silicon host. Having some teething troubles that are
likely more to do with VirtualBox but maybe someone can enlighten me on
some of this.

What I am seeing is the Guest dropping all network access, in and outbound,
as well as losing time sync during that time. I don't see any sleep
commands for the Guest OS and I have turned off disk sleep in the Host
(it's an SSD so I expect that did nothing). The VBox console stays active,
I can type in it and response is instantaneous. Network connections that
were timing out work after that. I am screensharing the mac desktop so
networking for the Host seems fine. I have fiddled with the KeepAlive
values in ssh but without any real expectations. No change there.

I have opened a thread on the VirtualBox forums but maybe someone here has
seen this. I really only have FreeBSD running a weblog (nginx/MySQL) and a
postfix relay so I could conceivably put this on a raspberry pi or
something, it's so light a load. The mac was bought for other purposes that
make the old one redundant except for this.

I can't find any sleep commands in VirtualBox so I don't know what's
happening there. There is no display in the mac mini yet but I turned off
display sleep anyway.

Any VirtualBox experts out there?
-- 
Paul Beard / www.paulbeard.org/