VBoxManage hang w/VirtualBox 4.3.28r100309 and CentOS 7

[Carl R. Friend]

I'm experiencing an issue where occasionally (about once a week) a "VBoxManage list vms" or "showvminfo" invocation will hang on a FUTEX wait and never recover. The host OS is 64-bit CentOS-7 (3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64) on a SuperMicro 32-core 128 GB server. VirtualBox is at version 4.3.28r100309 with 18 VMs typically running, all with Linux guests of assorted versions although mostly RedHat/CentOS 5 and 6. A substantially similar setup worked completely normally with RedHat 6.1 (3.11.4-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64) on an older server (also a SuperMicro device).

Initially, I thought that the problem was the web interface (talking to phpVirtualBox) but that has since been disproved as I've not been using, nor even running, the web interface process.

The unfortunate upshot of this is that when VBoxManage hangs the only recourse is to kill off the VBoxSVC which has the side-effect of crashing all the VMs. As my company relies on the automated use of VBoxManage to save the state of VMs for backup purposes, this is causing some degree of pain and uncertainty.

Is anyone else seeing this sort of behaviour in a similar configuration, and, if so, is there a way to fix it? The only search hits seem to be from older versions which either had the bugs closed or obsoleted. Thanks for any ideas or pointers!

[Carl R. Friend]

It looks like this one was down to a sleep/FUTEX wait bug that was backported into the RedHat 3.10.0-123.13.2.el7.x86_64 kernel. Upgrading to 3.10.0-229.7.2.el7.x86_64 seems to have solved the issue.