[FalsePositive] Freezes in Windows7 Guest

[bifi.ftw]

Greetings everyone,

I'm unsure whether this post should be in "Windows Guests" or "VirtualBox on Linux Hosts" as I'm still trying to find out who is the culprit here, but I'm suspecting it's virtualbox and a problem of the guestOS, so I'm posting it in the linux section.

I'm running Gentoo, here is the system information I imagine is relevant:

kernel: 4.9.95-gentoo
app-emulation/virtualbox-5.1.36
app-emulation/virtualbox-additions-5.1.36-r1
app-emulation/virtualbox-modules-5.1.36
Memory gentoo: 16 GB
Memory guestOS: 8 GB

Additions are installed on the guestOS

After updating my system which included virtualbox as well as the kernel the following problem started occuring:

When using the guestOS (Windows 7) after a few minute everything freezes except the mouse, i.e. I can move the mouse but not click anywhere, also no button presses are registered.
When a monitor is attached to my laptop I can switch to tty1 to unfreeze everything, if no monitor is attached this doesn't work. When moving the mouse from the guestOS to the other monitor with the hostOS the cursor doesn't change shape as it is supposed to. When performing actions during the freeze be it in the guest or hostOS they are performed once the system is unfrozen by switch to tty1 and back.

My biggest problem is that no errors or other reports are logged leaving me with no clue why this is happening.
I can provoke a freeze by drawing rectangles with the cursor on the desktop
Freeze occured shortly before 15:17:16, all logs are aquired within 1 min after the freeze.

Logs dmesg, VBox.log, VBoxSVC.log and Xorg.0.log are attached to this post and linked in the second.

I have tried the following things so far without any effect:
- Use genkernel to find out if the error is caused by my custom kernel
- Solve error in VBoxSVC.log (Failed to open "/dev/vboxdrvu", errno=13, rc=VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_ACCESSIBLE) by manually changing chown and chmod of /dev/vboxdrv vboxdrvu and vboxnetctl. The error disappears but freezes still occur

Any hints about what is going on are highly appreciated.

Thank you for your time

[bifi.ftw]

dmesg:
https://paste.pound-python.org/show/jBp ... MryiHBDxz/

Xorg.0.log:
https://paste.pound-python.org/show/sZ0 ... zfXGOMi1D/

VBox.log:
https://paste.pound-python.org/show/ygJ ... s9jqtcjft/

VBoxSBV.log:
https://paste.pound-python.org/show/Phf ... fcKgmPkV5/

[Martin]

Please ZIP your logfiles and attach them here using the "Upload attachment" feature below the reply entry field.

[bifi.ftw]

Logs are now attached to the first post.

[socratis]

VirtualBox VM 5.1.36_Gentoo r122089 linux.amd64 (May 26 2018 15:25:45) release log

It looks like you're using the distro's fork version of VirtualBox. You can either ask in their forums for help, or completely remove/uninstall/delete/purge their version and install the official version from the Downloads section of VirtualBox.

Having said that, here are some generic recommendations:

00:00:00.268474 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000004 (4)
00:00:00.408161 CPUM: Physical host cores: 4
00:00:00.408392 Full Name: "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz"

You have assigned all your CPUs to the VM. The host is going to run low on resources, since VirtualBox cares about physical processors (cores), not logical ones (threads). See "CPU Cores versus threads" and "Why is it a bad idea to allocate as many VCPUs as there are physical CPUs?". Your i7-4710MQ has 4 cores / 8 threads.

00:00:00.223911 File system of '/home/bifi/.VirtualBox/Machines/windows7_64bit_LABWORK/Snapshots' (snapshots) is ext4

That's an unusual place to keep your VMs. Any particular reason?

00:00:00.416016 Host path '/home/bifi', map name 'bifi', writable, automount=false, create_symlinks=false, missing=false

Are you sure that you want to give RW access to your home directory? You don't think about accidental deletions/infections?

[bifi.ftw]

I already changed the number of CPUs after reading throught the recommended threads, the log was from before that.

This is the default location in gentoo, I didn't get around to change it.

Yes I want to give RW access to my home directory, unfortunately that is how I need to use my virtualbox. Yes I'm worried about deletions/infections.


The freezes were caused by a defective hard drive, which is why no error messages were printed.

[socratis]

the log was from before that.

When I'm asking for a log, I don't want to see a random log, from a random run, with random settings. I want to see a log where/when the problem shows in the logs. Keep that in mind the next time around...

This is the default location in gentoo, I didn't get around to change it.

So, they change the default "/home/bifi/VirtualBox VMs" to "/home/bifi/.VirtualBox/Machines/"? Interesting...

The freezes were caused by a defective hard drive, which is why no error messages were printed.

Not even on your host? No SMART indications? Anyway, marking this as [FalsePositive], because it was a hardware failure, not VirtualBox that was causing the problem.

[mpack]

00:00:00.223911 File system of '/home/bifi/.VirtualBox/Machines/windows7_64bit_LABWORK/Snapshots' (snapshots) is ext4

That's an unusual place to keep your VMs. Any particular reason?

That looks like the prehistorical folder structure from v3.x. It guess it must be an old VM, never converted or cloned. This folder structure was abandoned in VirtualBox v4.0, in December 2010. Win7 would have been around by then. VM cloning was introduced in v4.1, in July 2011, since when it has been a trivial matter to bring a v3 VM up to v4 spec - though you may have had to juggle VM UUIDs in order to maintain Win7 activation.

[socratis]

That looks like the prehistorical folder structure from v3.x.

So, the default in 3.x was a hidden folder? Now it becomes even more interesting!

I started using VirtualBox in the 3.x era, but only for a couple of months, so I must have transitioned (or recreated) my VMs to the 4.x format, can't remember.

[mpack]

Yep. To quote the user manual :-

2. Storing virtual disk images, which can grow very large, under the hidden .VirtualBox
directory (at least on Linux and Solaris hosts) made many users wonder where their disk
space had gone.

Obviously this folder was not hidden on Windows hosts.

[bifi.ftw]

When I'm asking for a log, I don't want to see a random log, from a random run, with random settings. I want to see a log where/when the problem shows in the logs. Keep that in mind the next time around...

The log was from before I changed the number of CPUs, however, it was of course right after the freeze occured and as I mentioned in my first post no error messages are printed when the freezes occur, consequently the logs I provided also had no error messages.