One of my vbox VMs became unresponsive sometime while I stepped away (maybe 5-6 hours). I was greeted by a black screen. About the only thing I was able to do with it was switch from fullscreen mode to desktop mode. I tried to obtain a console inside the VM (running devuan chimaera) but there was no response. I tried an ACPI shutdown, which did not work. Then I tried to stop the VM from the vbox gui, which also did not work. Finally, I forced the VM to stop with SIGTERM (not SIGKILL) from the host.
The host and all guests are running 6.1.34. The host Devuan Beowulf; guest in question is Devuan Chimaera.
All other VMs appear (so far) to be running normally. I checked the kern.log and syslog on the host and the guest (after restarting it). I do not notice anything of note, other than the guest's kern.log having a lot of errors "drm:vmw_msg_ioctl [vmwgfx]] *ERROR* Failed to open channel" -- but a search of the web seems to indicate these are not real problems.
I am attaching two logs, one which stops at the freeze, and the other after I sent the SIGTERM until it finally shut down with an aborted state.
VM froze; no response or access to guest console
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VM froze; no response or access to guest console
- Attachments
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- myvm0-2022-04-20-18-45-37.log.gz
- Log up until the freeze
- (62.76 KiB) Downloaded 9 times
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- myvm0-2022-04-20-18-39-41.log.gz
- Same log, with events subsequent to killing the VM with SIGTERM.
- (62.14 KiB) Downloaded 5 times
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
FWIW, those log messages indicate problems with disk I/O. In the past, I've mostly seen this behavior with long-running VMs (like yours).myvm0-2022-04-20-18-45-37.log wrote:20:09:42.302727 06:08:31.949172 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007fe165312d40 completed after 10 seconds [...] 14:52:06.782885 144:50:56.426675 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007fe1650b6f80 completed after 13 seconds [...] 19:26:19.547412 149:25:09.193786 AHCI#0: Port 1 reset 19:26:19.555154 149:25:09.201593 AHCI#0: Port 0 reset 19:26:19.556323 149:25:09.202754 VD#0: Cancelling all active requests [...] 19:28:22.923611 149:27:12.569951 VMMDev: Guest Log: vgdrvLinuxIOCtlSlow: copy_to_user(0x7fff9a40b030,,0x1c); uCmd=0xc020560a! [...] 01:44:52.242834 155:43:41.889277 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'SUSPENDING' 01:44:52.242911 155:43:41.889353 PDMR3Suspend: after 0 ms, 1 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:44:53.553642 155:43:43.200094 PDMR3Suspend: after 1310 ms, 3 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:44:54.553899 155:43:44.200252 PDMR3Suspend: after 2310 ms, 4 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:44:56.553495 155:43:46.199884 PDMR3Suspend: after 4310 ms, 6 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:45:00.553777 155:43:50.200165 PDMR3Suspend: after 8310 ms, 10 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:45:08.552925 155:43:58.199318 PDMR3Suspend: after 16309 ms, 18 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0 01:45:24.554815 155:44:14.201194 PDMR3Suspend: after 32311 ms, 34 loops: 1 async tasks - ahci/0
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
Thank you for the reply. Can you describe what sort of disk problems? Is this limited only to the guest, or does this involve the virtualbox host-side disk i/o also?
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
AFAIU (but I'm no expert on that), the host-side disk I/O would be my primary suspect. The AsyncCompletion log messages are only written when a task needed at least 10 seconds, which is a very long time IMO. You can check for those log messages while the VM is running. In the provided log, they appeared already after 6 hours runtime, which hints to a general problem.
As a test, you could toggle Storage > Controller: SATA > Use Host I/O Cache. Note that this could make it better or worse.
As a test, you could toggle Storage > Controller: SATA > Use Host I/O Cache. Note that this could make it better or worse.
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
I've just upgraded the host (debian 10 to debian 11). Keep in mind that I've rarely seen this scenario. So it could just be a one-off.
So I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach on this.
So I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach on this.
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
I understand that you're talking about the freezing in the end here. But I suspect that you're having a general problem recognizable by the AsyncCompletion log messages, and it wouldn't hurt to check all your VBox.log files of all your VMs for that.HarryMan wrote:Keep in mind that I've rarely seen this scenario.
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
I see these messages on several VMs.
EDIT: I do not see any kernel log errors on the host, at least not ones like "ata0...some error"-- are there some other linux kernel messages I should look for on the host side?
Incidentally, I have not seen a freeze-up again since I reported this initially. I am not sure if the system upgrade to Chimaera (debian 11) did or did not impact things. I'd like to stay on the newer kernel (5.10.0)
EDIT: I do not see any kernel log errors on the host, at least not ones like "ata0...some error"-- are there some other linux kernel messages I should look for on the host side?
Incidentally, I have not seen a freeze-up again since I reported this initially. I am not sure if the system upgrade to Chimaera (debian 11) did or did not impact things. I'd like to stay on the newer kernel (5.10.0)
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
I don't have any concrete idea regarding that, sorry.HarryMan wrote:I do not see any kernel log errors on the host, at least not ones like "ata0...some error"-- are there some other linux kernel messages I should look for on the host side?
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Re: VM froze; no response or access to guest console
Since upgrading to devuan chimaera, I've not seen this scenario. OTOH, this type of failure is intermittent and unpredictable.
So I am not sure if this is solved, per se, or if the bug still lurks, lying in wait for me...
So I am not sure if this is solved, per se, or if the bug still lurks, lying in wait for me...