virtualbox.org

Hello.

I just upgraded the old 13" MacBook Pro (macOS Mojave v10.14.6)'s VB v6.1.20 from v6.1.18. I already upgraded the guest additions in 64-bit W10 and 64-bit W7 VMs and briefly tested them with no problems. However, not for Mac OS X El Capitan v10.11.6 guest VM. It upgraded (also tried uninstalling, rebooting, and reinstalling to see if upgrade was the issue) and said success, but then VM stopped responding. Guest VM's mouse cursor wouldn't move anymore. VM's drive status didn't blink. Trying to close the guest VM failed and showed a spinning pinwheel cursor over VB. Host still worked. I had to kill hogging VirtualBoxVM processes to reuse VB again. I never had this problem before. I was able to reproduce it thrice. I didn't save a snapshot of this crash session in case we need to get more datas (very easy to reproduce for me), so I reverted back to the previous guest VM's snapshot from 1/20/2021 with v6.1.18 guest addditions installed. I attached a zip file with a screen shot/capture and a couple VB logs. Rebooting the host didn't fix it.

Did anyone else have this problem too? Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon.

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.

mpack wrote: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.

Oops. I didn't get the right log earlier. Sorry and thanks. Attached a new zip file with the requested correct log from my fourth reproduction.

People who know more about Macs that me will need to comment, but the first thing that catches my eye in the log is the teeny graphics RAM allocation. Even the basic VESA graphics chipset needs RAM I believe. I would increase to 64MB.

Why did you install the GAs btw? What feature of the MacOS GAs were you looking for?

mpack wrote:People who know more about Macs that me will need to comment, but the first thing that catches my eye in the log is the teeny graphics RAM allocation. Even the basic VESA graphics chipset needs RAM I believe. I would increase to 64MB.

Why did you install the GAs btw? What feature of the MacOS GAs were you looking for?

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html says faster speeds, drag and drop, sharing, drivers, etc.

I increased the VRAM to max (128 MB) and enabled 3D accceleration, and was still able to reproduce it. I even tried uninstalling the GAs, rebooting, and reinstalling. Same results.

ant wrote:

mpack wrote:Why did you install the GAs btw? What feature of the MacOS GAs were you looking for?

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html says faster speeds, drag and drop, sharing, drivers, etc.

Chapter 4 also gives a list of the guests it gives those features to, and you should have noticed that MacOS was not in the list. The GAs only work in Windows (NT family only) and Linux, plus partial support for Solaris and OS/2. No Macs.

The MacOS GAs barely function, which is why they are not mentioned in the docs: there is certainly none of the features you listed. No 3D acceleration either - so best turn that off again.
See MacOS GAs: what is working.

If those were the features wanted then probably you can solve your problem by uninstalling the GAs: I assume MacOS has some kind of safe/clean boot feature to allow that.

Edit:  But try Fth0's audio suggestion first.

There have been substantial audio related changes in VirtualBox 6.1.20, including some for macOS hosts. In the VM configuration, disable audio completely and see if the problem persists.

Note that the VirtualBox Guest Additions (GA) have nothing to do with audio, but the suspending and resuming of the guest during the GA installation had, and the last log message was audio related.

fth0 wrote:There have been substantial audio related changes in VirtualBox 6.1.20, including some for macOS hosts. In the VM configuration, disable audio completely and see if the problem persists.

Note that the VirtualBox Guest Additions (GA) have nothing to do with audio, but the suspending and resuming of the guest during the GA installation had, and the last log message was audio related.

I disabled the audio with my guest VM off and retried to reproduce it. Disabling audio fixed the issue! Thanks! Just in case, I added this issue to the bug tracker: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/20319. I hope it gets fixed soon.

Thanks for reporting back and creating the ticket in the Bugtracker.

IMO: if the GAs were not required to reproduce this fault then the ticket should not have mentioned them. MacOS GAs are not supported, so if a dev scans the ticket and gets the idea that this issue concerns the MacOS GAs then the ticket could be ignored.

ant wrote:

fth0 wrote:There have been substantial audio related changes in VirtualBox 6.1.20, including some for macOS hosts. In the VM configuration, disable audio completely and see if the problem persists.

Note that the VirtualBox Guest Additions (GA) have nothing to do with audio, but the suspending and resuming of the guest during the GA installation had, and the last log message was audio related.

I disabled the audio with my guest VM off and retried to reproduce it. Disabling audio fixed the issue! Thanks! Just in case, I added this issue to the bug tracker: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/20319. I hope it gets fixed soon.

OK, I see the issue now. It is definitely audio (e.g., iTunes) and not GA. GA installer was making audio to crash it. I updated my ticket (wished I could edit the original post or even close the ticket and start a new one).