virtualbox.org

Just installed VBox 3.2 final and tried to use Page Fusion.
I had two WindowsXP Sp3 32 bits staying around so I enabled page fusion on both. But then every time i tried to run both machines at the same time they hang.
Running just one at a time is fine, and disabling page fusion all goes Ok as well.

Host: Ubuntu Lucid 64 bits
Guests: Window s XP 32 bits (Sp3)
Guest additions fully instaleld in safe mode.


Attached are the logs for both VMs, the problem happened on logs 2 and 3.
Thanks.

Same here. Tried with win7 x64 host and 2008r2 guest. Memory ballooning is working fine, but if I enable page fusion the guest locks up and I have to reboot the host to get it back to normal. I also tried it with Ubuntu 10.04 x64 as the host and I get similar results with the same guest or even a win7 x64 guest. I haven't tried any 32 bit guests.

Made the same experience: I was using 2 VMs created some time ago under VBox 3.0.4. Upgraded from 3.1.8 to 3.2.0 and manually ran "/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup" to rebuild the kernel modules. Both VMs are Windows XP SP3 32bit and run fine (unmodified) under 3.2.0. When I enable Page Fusion on both VMs, the first VM runs fine but 30 seconds after starting the second VM, the first and some times also the second VM locks up.

"VBoxManage controlvm VMNAME poweroff" also hangs but "kill PID" (PID=process ID of the hanging VBoxHeadless process) stops the VMs in a way that they can be reconfigured/restarted (no need to reboot host).

Host system has an Intel Q9400 (Quad) with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04 amd64) and I'm using VBoxHeadless to start the machines. ACPI, IOAPIC, VT-x, VTX-VPID and nested paging are enabled, PAE and large pages are disabled.

Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong here?

How many processors are dedicated to the guest?
I tried this on a core2duo which is a single processor with 2 cores. Setting the processors to 2 of course gives me SMP but the true processor count was one.
I changed the processor count to one and the guests booted properly. I have not run the tests as yet but hope to later today or tomorrow.

Processor configuration of both VMs is like this Only running 1 VM works fine, problems start with the second VM

Don't know what to tell you. I have (2) XP pro 32 bit machines running with Page Fusion on.
Host is Ubuntu 10.04_x86-64 Allocated memory to guests is 512MB each
See Screen Shot.

This is good news as it works in your configuration. I plan to create 2 fresh VMs today and re-test. I'll post the results here including the log files.

Switching to 1 cpu in the guest fixed all my issues. I can run with ballooning and page fusion without any issues.

In my tests I was using one guest with one CPU and the other with two cpus.
As it seens this is the issue I'll test with one cpu in each guest and post the result latter today.

Cheers

Having the exact same issue with a linux 2.6.34 host, and Windows 7 guest. If I turn the CPU to 1 it's fine, anymore than 1 and I see a crash.

@michael55123,

How many processors do you have, (not cores), and how many did you select?

I have 1 CPU, with 4 cores. I selected 1 cpu by doing a VBoxManage modifyvm vmname --cpu 1 .

Actually I'm seeing the same issue with just one CPU, it's just not as bad.

Yeap,

With just one core in each VM all seens normal.
And using VBoxManage metrics, i cann see that there is shared pages among the VMs.

So the issue is caused when running with more than one vcpu.

As two older WinXP VMs "randomly" hang with page fusion enabled, I created two new VMs and installed WinXP 32bit SP3. For the VM creation and XP installation I used defaults wherever possible. With those newly created VMs I could not reproduce the hang with page fusion enabled.

There are many differences between the new (working) and the old (hanging) XP virtual machines. As time permits, I will try to isolate the problem and post again in this thread.