VM hangs when going in to graphical mode

[RossB]

My host and guest are both running Linux. After some recent updates (on both host and guest) I restarted the guest. The guest came up in text mode (as always); I logged onto an account and executed startx. The screen resized, as expected, but after that was unresponsive--right click did nothing. Initially the VM controls still worked; I was able to stop and resume mouse integration. Eventually I tried the VirtualBox GUI and found it was completely unresponsive. VBoxManage returned some basic info about the vm, but poweroff displayed a progress indicator that stopped at 20% and hung there.

I restarted the host system and tried again. The results were the same.

The recent updates don't sound relevant (security fixes for imagemagick) but both the host and guest had been up for an extended time, ~ a month, and some earlier updates may have caught up with me. The host does use DKMS.

My easier question is whether there is a way to reset things without bringing the whole host down.

My harder question is what I can do to restore proper operation of the guest, which was working fine until this.

Running VirtualBox VM 4.3.36_Debian r105129 linux.amd64, NVidia proprietary drivers + kernel 3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt25-2~bpo70+1 (2016-04-12) x86_64 GNU/Linux on the host. I think guest additions are on the guest.

[RossB]

Partially answering my easier question:
This didn't work:

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# /etc/init.d/virtualbox stop
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modulesCannot unload module vboxnetflt ... failed!
 failed!

However, ps found, among other thiings,

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 7758 ?        S      0:01 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxXPCOMIPCD
 7765 ?        Sl     0:04 /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSVC --auto-shutdown
 7822 ?        Sl     1:11  \_ /usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox --comment media02 --startvm c421ab55-983b-xxx-bcba-1190a63d3db9 --no-startvm-errormsgbox

Killing the last process made the VirtualBox GUI responsive again, and after /etc/init.d/virtualbox start I restarted the VM. I don't know if the /etc/init.d/virtualbox stop/start was necessary.

The VM seems to be working OK as long as I don't go into graphics mode. It clearly has guest additions, but the logs on it don't show anything interesting. Xorg.0.log is empty; Xorg.0.log.old shows no errors and ends with "Server terminated successfully". Likewise nothing looks amiss in the kernel logs. Of course, because the VM was shutdown hard anything written to the disk may have been lost when the disks were fixed up on restart.

The logs on the host likewise don't show anything that looks like an error to me. For one of the hangs, the VM logs ended with

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00:02:05.917724 UIFrameBufferQImage::resizeEvent: Format=843204434, BitsPerPixel=32, BytesPerLine=8740, Size=2185x1315
00:02:05.917734 UIFrameBufferQImage::resizeEvent: Resizing to directly use VGA device content..
00:02:05.917769 VBVA_INFO_SCREEN: [0] @0,0 2185x1315, line 0x2224, BPP 32, flags 0x1
00:02:05.937745 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=00007f6208b80000 w=2185 h=1315 bpp=32 cbLine=0x2224, flags=0x1
00:02:05.937776 UIFrameBuffer::RequestResize: Screen=0, Format=843204434, BitsPerPixel=32, BytesPerLine=8740, Size=2185x1315, Sending to async-handler..
00:02:05.937824 UIFrameBufferQImage::resizeEvent: Format=843204434, BitsPerPixel=32, BytesPerLine=8740, Size=2185x1315
00:02:05.937832 UIFrameBufferQImage::resizeEvent: Resizing to directly use VGA device content..
00:02:05.950350 Starting host clipboard service
00:02:05.950377 Initializing X11 clipboard backend
00:02:05.994879 Shared clipboard: starting shared clipboard thread

[Perryg]

Post the guests log file ( as an attachment ). Right click on the guest in the Main Manager then click show log. Save and post as an attachment. Compress if it is too large to post.

[RossB]

Here's the log from one of the sessions that locked up. Interestingly, there is a power off logged after it hung.

[Perryg]

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00:00:00.528984 Package type: LINUX_64BITS_GENERIC (OSE)

00:00:01.827907 UIFrameBufferQImage::resizeEvent: Resizing to FALLBACK buffer due to format is invalid..

We don't support the repo fork of VirtualBox here so you would need to ask them what is going on. You can remove theirs and install the official version from VirtualBox.org and see if that fixes your issue. If not them we could see if anything can be done.