Identical VMs on identical hosts on near-identical hardware...

[ElRudi]

...but one crashes continuously.

I have a 2016 Dell XPS 13 laptop, and a 2020 Dell XPS 13 laptop. Once I received the latter I did a complete and identical newinstall of both - Pop!_OS 20.10 with Virtualbox 6.1.14_Ubuntu r140239. I had made a backup of my windows 10 VM's .vdi file, which I copied onto each machine and which each machine can run.

However.

On the old laptop, the VM is stable and runs without any issues.
On the new one, it's constantly crashing. Sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes after half an hour. Usually without any warning - it just suddenly reboots. On rare occasions, I get a "KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED" (no indication of the culprit) blue screen of death. No drivers in window's device manager are reporting a problem.


In the guest's 'reliability history', there are several entries. They usually come in 3 rows; here is an example:

1] Windows was not properly shut down. 1/5/2021 11:56PM
"The previous system shutdown at 23:51:48 on ‎05/‎01/‎2021 was unexpected."
2] Windows stopped working. 1/5/2021 11:56PM
"The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000001e (0xffffffff80000002, 0xfffff8033bf38f03, 0xffff820500d6523e, 0x7010008004002001). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 4edba642-58c2-4b3e-893e-79ebab91bee4."
3] Shut down unexpectedly. 1/5/2021 11:56PM
Problem signature
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
Code: 1e
Parameter 1: ffffffff80000002
Parameter 2: fffff8033bf38f03
Parameter 3: ffff820500d6523e
Parameter 4: 7010008004002001
OS version: 10_0_19042
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1
OS Version: 10.0.19042.2.0.0.256.165
Locale ID: 3072


If there is no blue screen (which is usually the case), the system freezes up for a few seconds and then reboots.


Does anyone know, where I could start to find the source if these problems?

Many thanks!

PS: let me know if you need any specifics of my system(s)
PPS: as a check, I also did a complete newinstall of windows 10 in a VM on the newer laptop, and it has the same problems as the original VM.

[fth0]

Just a guess: For a test, remove the virtual network and audio hardware from the guest and see if the problem persists.

[ElRudi]

Just a guess: For a test, remove the virtual network and audio hardware from the guest and see if the problem persists.

Thanks for your suggestion. Could you elaborate a bit; I'm not sure if I'm doing this correctly.

What I've done for audio: in the guest's Device Manager, I've removed the speaker and microphone from 'audio inputs and outputs', I've removed the audio device from 'sound, video and game controllers'. This didn't do the trick as the system rebooted a while later. Or, did you mean for me to disable audio from the virtualbox settings for the VM?
For the virtual network I'm even less certain: there is a section 'network adapters' in the guest's Device Manager, but disabling that won't let me access the internet anymore, rendering the VM useless. Or was this just for debugging purposes? The Virtualbox settings for the VM also have a networking section, currently set to cable-connected NAT.


I've also added additional information about the crashes in the main post.


Many thanks again

[fth0]

My bad (inaccurate instructions). I really meant to remove the virtual network and audio hardware from the VM configuration settings (Network > Adapter <n> > Enable Network Adapter and Audio > Enable Audio), and just for a test, to see if the problem persists.

A little bit of background reasoning: I've read about cases where similar crashes inside the guest OS could be eliminated by changing host OS hardware drivers, and removing the virtual hardware will prevent such connections. It's a bit like grasping at straws, since this type of crash was rarely (if ever) solved by analyzing the crash itself.

[ElRudi]

Tried it, but no luck; the VM rebooted nonetheless...

I see quite some people on this forum with the same issue (raising my hopes of attention and a fix), but noone that has gotten it solved apparently.

If there's anything else I can try or do to help, be sure to let me know.

[shapeshifter]

I have the same problem. On my 2018 Dell XPS 13 the Windows 10 VM worked fine. On this 2020 Dell XPS 2-in-1 (7390) the VM crashes. This happens very regularly, after just a few minutes.

I tried changing all kinds of settings, but to now avail.

In fact, I noticed that it happens even if I just boot from the official Windows 10 Installation ISO and do nothing at all. Just waiting on that first screen where one selects the language, the VM will crash after a few minutes. I tried reinstalling Windows and the VM crashed twice, but eventually I got a run where the installation was able to finish.

Now it crashes like before with the given error message, "KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED", "The bugcheck was: 0x0000001e" and all that.

I've actually had this problem all throughout last year but never bothered to fix it because I rarely use the VM. But it is completely broken, really...

EDIT: Since it crashes even at the start of the installer I thought maybe it's a problem unrelated to windows, but it seems that a Linux guest VM runs stable without any problems for long durations. But Windows (even the install medium) crashes and reboots after a few minutes.

[ElRudi]

Thanks for your reply!

Clever, isolating the problem. So it must be the combination of the host hardware and the guest OS.

Also, (obviously) the virtualisation layer is involved, as installing windows directly on my hardware does work.

Let's see if someone else has any ideas

[fth0]

But Windows (even the install medium) crashes and reboots after a few minutes.

Thanks for experimenting and reporting back.

This eliminates the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel drivers from the potential suspects. Can you simplify the VM that's running only from the install medium even more? In the VirtualBox configuration, uncheck System > Acceleration > Enable Nested Paging. Note that the VM will run considerably slower then, and wait 10 times as long for the crash to happen. Additionally, set Display > Screen > Graphics Controller to None. Please reproduce the crash and post a zipped VBox.log file.

[ElRudi]

I changed the settings as requested, and have currently been staring at a black screen for the 45min - not even the prompt "boot from DVD installation media" has appeared. Am I doing something wrong?

I've attached the log file, the line

ERROR [COM]: aRC=E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005) aIID={4680b2de-8690-11e9-b83d-5719e53cf1de} aComponent={DisplayWrap} aText={The console is not powered up}, preserve=false aResultDetail=0

is very common, appearing first about 1 second after booting.

Also, when changing the configuration, setting the graphics controller to None does not go down well, see attached screenshot.

[fth0]

I changed the settings as requested, and have currently been staring at a black screen for the 45min - not even the prompt "boot from DVD installation media" has appeared. Am I doing something wrong?

No, you did it right. You removed the Graphics Controller from the VM (as requested), and the guest OS having no graphical output device created no graphical output obviously, hence the black screen. The Invalid settings detected warning was also ok, since VirtualBox accepted what you did on my request as a reason, didn't it?

The VBox.log file still shows the same crashes, which means that the Graphics Controller is not needed (or irrelevant) to reproduce the crash. So you successfully contributed a piece to the puzzle.

[ElRudi]

Yes, as a very good reason indeed

Ok, glad I could help. If there's anything else I can do, please let me know!

[klaus]

Workaround (and later hopefully information about the fix) in https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/20180

[ElRudi]

Ah great, many thanks for coming back to us about it!