Virtualbox crashes with more than 4 GB RAM reserved for guest

[Frank Steiner]

Hi,
I'm running Virtualbox 5.2.18 on opensuse 13.2 (kernel 4.4.156) and 15.0 (4.12.14), using Windows 7 as guest os. The host systems have 32 GB RAM and either nvidia or radeon cards, CPU is Intel i7-3770.

It works all fine on 13.2, but in 15.0 the machine crashes during startup when I reserve more than 4 GB or RAM for the guest. I've read it has sth. to do with VT-X, but as there is no problem when booting opensuse 13.2 on the same machine (13.2 and 15.0 installed in parallel) it cannot depend on bios settings etc. but must be some settings inside opensuse 15.0 or its kernel.

In the log (attached) I can see a lot of VMX_EXIT_EPT_VIOLATION - 48 - EPT violation error messages and at the end it exits with VERR_NO_MEMORY

Does anyone have an idea what could cause those VMX problems only in opensuse 15.0?

cu,
Frank

[mpack]

VirtualBox VM 5.2.18_SUSE r123745 linux.amd64 (Sep 17 2018 12:00:00) release log

You do not have a VirtualBox problem, because you are not running VirtualBox. You need to either go to the SUSE forums for support, or install the official build of VirtualBox. Then let us see if your problem still exists.

I'll offer the tip that VirtualBox needs to allocate VM RAM in one contiguous chunk, so VERR_NO_MEMORY can occur if host memory is fragmented somehow by some memory hungry app.

[Frank Steiner]

Hi,

sorry, the opensuse version of VirtualBox was my last try because I thought SuSE may have added a patch for this problem for lesp 15. I started with the official VirtualBox when I ran into the problem.

I've upgraded to 5.2.20 and still have the problem. The "EPT violation" messages disappear when I lower the reserved memory to 3727 MB. With 3728 they are still there. Could that give a hint? I've attached both logs.

Before I start virtualbox, "free" shows this:

Code: Select all

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:       32875712     2994848    23001744       21060     6879120    29395480
Swap:      41945084           0    41945084

So I guess there should be enough free memory...

cu,
Frank

[socratis]

00:00:00.401456 [/Devices/hpet/0/Config/] (level 4)
00:00:00.401457   ICH9 <integer> = 0x0000000000000001 (1)

Can you please hover over the chipset until the tooltip appears? Can you read the tooltip? Can you now explain why you chose the experimental, OSX-guests-only, ICH9 chipset instead of the default proposed PIIX3 by the template? Please change it back and report what's the outcome...

[Frank Steiner]

That settings was left-over from our tries to change a lot of values, hoping that would make VirtualBox work. There's no difference using PIIX3.

But I was able to solve the problem: vm.max_map_count was set to 3096 for some reason, I still have to figure out which RPM changed this value. Setting it back to 65530 as it was on SLE 12 made VirtualBox work again.

So it was indeed a memory problem, caused by some bad VM setting. Hope this helps if someone else runs into this problem!

cu,
Frank

[socratis]

But I was able to solve the problem: vm.max_map_count was set to 3096

So it was indeed a memory problem, caused by some bad VM setting

That's not a VirtualBox setting that I'm familiar with. In fact, most searches point to a kernel configuration setting. So, I'm not sure how this is a VirtualBox problem, and why shouldn't this thread be tagged as a [WorksForMe]...