Trying to start it eats up ram and virtual memory and does not start.

[Ign]

I had virtualbox 6.1.34-150636.1~Debian~bullseye and everything was fine. Then, the package system upgraded to virtualbox 6.1.36-152435~Debian~bullseye and now, when I try to start, it eats up all the memory, then all the virtual memory and Virtualbox does not start. The computer get blocked and the only thing I can do is to press the hard reset button in the computer.
My computer has 15GB of RAM and 18 GB of swap disk.

Any ideas?

If I can not solve it, how could I downgrade it back to 6.1.34?

[mpack]

Please provide a VM log file. Make sure the VM is fully shut down, then right click it in the manager UI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (no other file) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

[Ign]

I can not do that. Virtualbox does not start at all. It eats up all RAM and swap disk before starting and the computer becomes unresponsive. The only thing I can do is to press the button of hard reset in the computer.

[scottgus1]

Then, the package system upgraded to virtualbox 6.1.36-152435~Debian~bullseye

To the best of my knowledge, Official Virtualbox from www.virtualbox.org does not auto-update, so you might be running the fork provided by the Linux distro.

Please consoder uninstalling what you have and installing from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads, please note there are prerequisites https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch02. ... nux-prereq

Then we might be able to help.

[fth0]

To the best of my knowledge, Official Virtualbox from http://www.virtualbox.org does not auto-update

Then we should enlarge your knowledge:

After the official Oracle VirtualBox repository has been added to the Linux distribution's package management (as for example described in the section "Debian-based Linux distributions" in the Linux downloads page), all automatic and manual update services also update the virtualbox-6.1 package.

[fth0]

when I try to start

Are you talking about the VirtualBox Manager or about a VM?

If I can not solve it, how could I downgrade it back to 6.1.34?

ATM, I don't know how to do that. FWIW, Synaptic on Linux Mint doesn't allow to force the virtualbox-6.1 package to a specific version.

[Ign]

when I try to start

Are you talking about the VirtualBox Manager or about a VM?

The VirtualBox Manager.

[Ign]

Then, the package system upgraded to virtualbox 6.1.36-152435~Debian~bullseye

To the best of my knowledge, Official Virtualbox does not auto-update, so you might be running the fork provided by the Linux distro.

Please consoder uninstalling what you have and installing from , please note there are prerequisites eq

Then we might be able to help.

No, it is not a fork from the distro. Synaptic downloads the package from Oracle repository.

[Ign]

If I can not solve it, how could I downgrade it back to 6.1.34?

ATM, I don't know how to do that. FWIW, Synaptic on Linux Mint doesn't allow to force the virtualbox-6.1 package to a specific version.[/quote]

That should not be a problem. I could do manually "apt purge" and then "apt install name_of_the_downloaded_package"

[scottgus1]

After the official Oracle VirtualBox repository has been added to the Linux distribution's package management (as for example described in the section "Debian-based Linux distributions" in the Linux downloads page), all automatic and manual update services also update the virtualbox-6.1 package.

Interesting! Is adding the Oracle repository to the package manager an automatic process? As in, does intentionally getting Official Virtualbox also tell the Linux host to add Oracle to the manager? Or is adding to the manager an extra manual step?

[fth0]

I could do manually "apt purge" and then "apt install name_of_the_downloaded_package"

I tried it myself without success: As soon as I upgraded the virtualbox-6.1 package to the 6.1.36 version, APT forgot about the existence of the previous version, and "sudo apt install virtualbox-6.1=6.1.34-150636.1~Ubuntu~eoan" was rejected.

You can manually download the older packages from https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.34/.

PS: Rereading what you wrote, you were saying the same thing.

[fth0]

Is adding the Oracle repository to the package manager an automatic process?

No, it's a manual step (unless you automated it with e.g. Ansible ). But once you've added the repository for VirtualBox 6.1, every automatic and manual update of the Linux installation (e.g. sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade) also updates the virtualbox-6.1 package.

[ArturPires]

Unfortunately, I don't have any solution, but, if it helps solve the problem, I am having exactly the same behaviour happening to me on a Windows 7 host.

Whenever I try to start the Virtual Box manager, it starts "eating" all my computer's memory and I have either to kill the VBoxSVC.exe process before it hits the limit or, if it does use up all the memory, hit the reset button on my computer.

The previous version was working fine, the new one (VirtualBox-6.1.36-152435-Win) shows this behaviour.

[mpack]

I very much doubt that any such problem exists. The report is not new, it has been reported many times over the years, and it always boils down to a misunderstanding of how caches work.

[ArturPires]

I just installed version 6.1.32-149290 and it worked as expected, no memory proplems.