Catastrophic data loss Linux Guest Mac OS X 11.2.1

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Mac OS X hosts.
Post Reply
AndrewA
Posts: 18
Joined: 5. May 2021, 00:56

Catastrophic data loss Linux Guest Mac OS X 11.2.1

Post by AndrewA »

I am experiencing repeatable catastrophic data loss on a Linux Guest (Ubuntu 20) using ext4 journaled on an "hdd" style (single file "Normal (Parallels)") SATA hard disk file hosted on an APFS file system via Mac OS X 11.2.1.

Bad things happen when Mac OS gets into a memory pressure scenario that causes that little panel to pop up, that asks you to kill apps.

With 100% certainty, if you end up having a stuck reboot (of Mac OS) in this condition, and power-cycle the machine, your Linux filesystem will have fsck errors that must be manually fixed (e2fsck -y) AND you will lose data. It seems that the ext4 journal gets borked or similar, since it tends to be newer/recently touched files and dirs that are toast.

With less certainty, this can also happen when rebooting the machine successfully in software, after the memory pressure condition.

It's also possible this had nothing to do with the memory pressure, and that the Linux.hdd ends up borked simply by rebooting Mac OS X 11.2.1 APFS backed hdd's without first cleanly shutting down the Linux host; and/or if VirtualBox is shut down without itself catching a termination signal and shutting down gracefully.

I am too busy to test a "kill -9" of VirtualBox to see if the root cause is the sudden death of VB on an APFS volume, vs sudden death of the host OS etc etc

What I do know is that I was never experiencing such issues until I upgraded to Big Sur, which I think is what "upgraded" my host root volume to APFS.
granada29
Volunteer
Posts: 687
Joined: 3. Mar 2015, 07:27
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: Linux, macOS, Windows

Re: Catastrophic data loss Linux Guest Mac OS X 11.2.1

Post by granada29 »

AndrewA wrote: Bad things happen when Mac OS gets into a memory pressure scenario that causes that little panel to pop up, that asks you to kill apps.
...

What I do know is that I was never experiencing such issues until I upgraded to Big Sur, which I think is what "upgraded" my host root volume to APFS.
Very sorry hear you are having these problems.

If your host system is running out of memory then you have a couple of options.

1. Allocate less memory to your VM - you are probably over commitiing system resources.
2. Install more memory in your host.

You haven't said anything about what version of macOS you were running prior to Big Sur. If it was Mojave you *may* have had an HFS system disk, although the default was APFS. If it was Catalina, then you definitely had an APFS system disk. Earlier than Mojave then almost certainly HFS.

It would help if you could please post a VBox.log (as an attachment). Right click your VM in the VirtualBox Manager window, then select Show in Finder. Locate VBox.log, right click it then choose Compress.

Submit another post to this topic and attach your compressed log using the Upload Attachment tab.
Post Reply