Kernel panic on MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6

[rootie]

Hi all,

I've got an issue with VirtualBox for quite a while now. The VM which has Windows 10 Professional 64-bit installed constantly causes a kernel panic on my MacBook Pro Early 2011 15". I'm able to reproduce this by following these steps:

Step 1: Reboot MacBook Pro
Step 2: Start VirtualBox and load the Microsoft Windows 10 guest
Step 3: Log on Windows 10 and let it load
Step 4: Press CMD+Q and select "Shutdown Virtual Machine" while leaving the checkbox "Go back to the last snapshot" enabled (I use the German version of VirtualBox; the real text might differ from what I wrote here, but you should be able to get the point)
Step 5: Quit VirtualBox and go to Step 2

After repeating this 5 times (and it's always 5 times!) the constellation is "on fire" which means: Trying to start up the VM a sixth time will definitely result in a kernel panic shortly after the Windows 10 logo appears.

All software on my MacBook Pro is up to date. VirtualBox is updated to 5.2.14 which is the most recent version as of today.

I've attached the kernel panic log, an EtreCheck log and my VirtualBox config file to this thread. I've searched the whole internet for that kernel panic error message but this seems to be a very isolated thing. That's why I hope that you guys can help me on that as it's very boring to constantly reboot my MacBook Pro just because of this.

One more thing: I don't suspect LittleSnitch to be the cause of this issue. This firewall is being used by lots of people in the Apple world and I'm quite sure that some other threads would be there if LittleSnitch was responsible for this.


Thanks a lot for your help in advance and best regards,
rootie

[ChipMcK]

Edit:
Ooops. This is not the post I intended.

[socratis]

That's an interesting problem. For starters, your VM settings are almost exactly same to my Win10-64 VM, so I don't think that there's a problem there. Oh, and I used to have the same exact Mac model, albeit with 10.11.6 installed, never liked 10.12/13.

The error that you're getting is caused by one or two conflicting kernel extensions. That's difficult to identify. Even the reason for the kernel panic is pointing to Apple:

panic(cpu 6 caller 0xffffff7f8c3d0a39): "Port driver should never refuse a tag to a single request device.
\n"@/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/IOAHCISerialATAPI/IOAHCISerialATAPI-267.50.1/IOAHCISerialATAPI.cpp:1043

Even searching for that error gives only a SINGLE result, which point to a suspicious "blog" site, pretty much containing a bunch of random text with links to an even more suspicious site. No need to follow that lead.

You have more things than LittleSnitch installed that are not simple apps. What caught my eye was the Citrix app. What the EtreCheck report said is that this extension is blocked:

Kernel Extensions:
  /Library/Application Support/Citrix Receiver
    [Blocked]    CitrixGUSB.kext (12.9.0 - SDK 10.9)

Searching for this extension reveals several links that claim that is causes some problems. Can you try and remove it and see if that changes the situation?

[rootie]

Hi socratis,

as expected, disabling Citrix Receiver does not work. The weird thing is that after a reboot it always works a few times without any issues. This is always reproducible and there must be something that VirtualBox does within the system to make it panic after those few tries.

After one try I always reset the VM to a savepoint so it always has the same "startup properties".

I think that this is a bug in VirtualBox. I even tried an entire clean reinstall of Windows 10. This also doesn't help.

Any more ideas? Do you need any more logs or can you provide me a tool that does additional logging?

[socratis]

there must be something that VirtualBox does within the system to make it panic after those few tries.

Usually not. I've dealt with a lot of pieces of software over the years and VirtualBox has been one of the most robust ones that I've seen. I replayed over and over the steps that you described. Nothing. Stable as a rock.

Plus, you're the only one that I can remember with a case like that, so my conclusion (non-scientific) is that there's something with your specific setup. It may be VirtualBox that "causes" this, but I'd say that it's not the underlying reason.