Ubuntu 10.10 Guest hangs, Windows 7 Host

[paulmdavies]

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 x64 guest under Windows 7 x64 host. My computer has a quad core processor and 8GB of RAM, of which I assign three cores and 4GB to VirtualBox. It also has plenty of hard drive space (600GB dynamic drive, of which about 25GB is used), and both 2D and 3D acceleration are disabled. My version of VirtualBox is up-to-date.

My problem is that my guest Ubuntu to grinds to a halt despite extremely light load. My host version of Windows remains responsive throughout. Symptoms of the crash are as follows:

- The Ubuntu desktop clock stops
- Initially, I can switch windows within the guest, but ths stops after a while and a complete crash happens.

Overall, the symptoms seem similar to those described in this post, but with the difference of me using Ubuntu rather than Fedora.

Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[dmichel]

Hi paulmdavies,

I have a similar setup as th3e one you describes although I have much less RAM (4GB in total, 2GB given to guest) and the guest crashes very often, especially when downloading stuff from the web... so I have the feeling this might have something to do with the dynamic expension setting of the virtual hard drive.

Have you tried having a fixed size hard disk instead for the guest OS ? I'm trying that now...

David

[paulmdavies]

I haven't used a fixed size hard disk, because the dynamic option is much more useful to me - I don't want to initially commit a huge amount of space to VB which I might want under Windows and might never use under Linux.

I wasn't doing anything particularly taxing at the time of the crash; I certainly wasn't creating any large files, but I believe I was saving a file in gedit at the time of the crash (< 1kB though...)

Do let me know if you get anywhere though!

[dmichel]

I just tried with a fresh install of ubuntu 10.04 LTS (I thought I'll try a long-term support version of Ubuntu just in case, instead of the latest 10.10) with a fized size disk of 100GB... same thing, whenever the disk gets written, it randonly hangs. It happens to me as I do some ubuntu updates, Subversion updates, or even downloading stuff from Dropbox).... I'm a bit stuck now cause I cannot seem to be able to get a stable VM running....

[rubinsh]

I am having the same problem.
I tried to disable the screen saver now.
sometimes this might help, but I also have no idea why this is happenning

[gregmo]

I'm having the same problem. I had ubuntu 10.04 guest under Windows 7 on a core 2 duo. It ran fine for months with the latest vbox version being 3.2.0.

I got a new machine, a core i7 with Windows 7. I installed VirtualBox 3.2.12 and copied my virtual machine over. I immediately started having the issues detailed in this post. I removed VirtualBox and went back to version 3.2.0 and have the same problems.

I was running 2 CPU's on the core 2 duo with no issues. I've tried 8, 6, 4, and 2 CPU's on the new machine and the problem still exists. Disk space and memory is not an issue.

[jonnybravo]

This seems to be a commonly reported problem, and one from which I also suffer. I have Windows 7 Pro x64 as host and Ubuntu 10.10 as guest. I have an i7 quad-core with 16G RAM, of which I have tried assigning various combinations of processor and memory settings. I have deleted and re-installed my guest multiple times with different settings as well as changing settings on existing guests. No setting combination has resulted in a stable guest. The longest I had the guest running was bout 2 hours before it crashed and burned. From what I see, the guest reads the CPUs as "locked" and becomes completely unresponsive. I have tried all of the "recommendations" found throughout my research, none of which worked. This was also a problem with vbox 3.2.10 on my system, and from reading this post it appears that it has been an issue for pretty much every release of the 3.2 vbox series.

I'd really love to see this get resolved. It makes it impossible to use vbox with Ubuntu

<edit>I have since installed Fedora 14 x64 on the same host. I have had absolutely zero problems with this setup. I now have two virtual machines: Ubuntu10.10 and Fedora14. Both were setup identically (4 processors with extensions enabled, 8G RAM, 60G drive, 128M video with 3d acceleration). The Ubuntu guest crashes and hangs at random. Fedora is running smooth as silk. Seems vbox isn't playing nicely with the latest from Ubuntu...</edit>

[TDL]

I'm pretty unsure of this, but I downloaded VBox 4.0 today and faced two problems:

- Ubuntu AMD64 installation caused my physical computer to REBOOT as if there was a power failure. No messages on event log whatsoever... I'll look further into that later.

- Fedora 14 installed fine, but it kept crashing the VirtualBox Manager and aborting the VM until I enabled the use of I/O cache on the virtual storage SATA controller. No hang/crash at the momment.

You might want to check that option on yours.

Regards!

UPDATE: Some hours now with 3D accel. + Compiz + Emerald + Flash 10.1 without a glitch. So... If the VM crashes when there's HD activity it may be solved by switching this setting from its default disabled state.

[ssander87]

VBox 4.0 is unusably unstable for me with a Win7 x64 Pro host - for Ubuntu 10.10 & 10.04, Fedora 14, openSUSE 11.3, and Linux Mint 10 guests (all x86, not x64).
I consistently get random lock-ups/freezes not just of the guest but sometimes also of VB itself - I have to either "power off the machine" or use taskmgr to kill VirtualBox.exe itself. After uninstalling 4.0 and reinstalling 3.2.12 (& repairing some incompatible vm config file changes made by 4.0 + reinstalling the 3.2.12 GA's), those same guests run as before - just fine. Any info on schedule for 4.0 stability updates?

[alia]

I had similar problem in my system with Windows 7 64bit host and Ubuntu 10.04 guest. The Ubuntu host started hanging frequently as soon as I upgraded Virtualbox from 3.2.10 to 3.2.12 release. I uninstalled Virtualbox 3.2.12 and installed 3.2.10 release. That solved the problem for me. My guest is running for more than a day without a problem. It appears that at least in my case, changes in 3.2.12 release caused this problem. I am going to stick with 3.2.10 release for now.

[sunandwavs]

I had similar hanging issues until I switched to 1 CPU core in my VM settings. The guest VM now seems to be stable. I got the idea from this posting

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=35214

[joseccz]

Well, seems I am not the only one having problems with virtual box 4.0. I have crashing problems with slack 11, ubuntu 10.10, but not with Sun solaris X. This one runs fine... Going back to VBox 3.2.10...

Thanks
Jose

[fredlwm]

Here, it only happens when I set more than one core (my Athlon 64 has two). Setting just one, it's very stable.

I tried today after a long time and it happened while I was sleeping. The clock stopped, I could still issue commands, but none completed.

But this isn't new to 4.0. It also hung the first time about a year ago. Slackware 13.37 with 2.6.39 and raw partitions, the same kernel and setup I use without VirtualBox.

[peternguyen]

Dear all,

I see the same problem on my PC. I use:

- Hardware: Inter(R) core(TM) i5 CPU, RAM=4GB
- OS: 64bits Windows 7
- OS instal on virtual box: 64bits SUSE version 11.4

My virtual machine is frozen often when running with 4 cores (CPU). The issue is not happened if OS only run with 1 core or 2 cores.

I see the problem on virtual box version: 4.0.0, 4.0.4, 4.0.8 and also on 3.2.10.

If you know which version of virtual box fixed this issue please let me know. thanks you very much for your help.

thanks,
Peter Nguyen

[mschwartz]

I have XP guest running on Windows 7 host. When I gave the guest 4 cores (my CPU has 4), virtualbox made my host unresponsive.

So I guess the thing is to set your guest CPUs to 1..n where n is the number of physical cores minus 1. Regardless of the guest OS.