Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Solaris hosts.
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mwilson
Posts: 4
Joined: 3. Aug 2009, 23:21
Primary OS: Solaris
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows XP

Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Post by mwilson »

I installed VirtualBox 4.1.0 on my fresh Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a), and it now hangs on boot. It seems like this might be some odd interplay between the VBox kernel driver and the mpt_sas driver that my storage HBA is using.

This is a fresh Solaris 11 Express install on my hardware. Before installing VirtualBox, everything works fine and I can reboot without problems. One time when I installed VirtualBox, the system actually hung right as the kernel driver was being installed. I rebuilt the box (for a different reason) and installed again, and it installed fine, but it always hangs on boot now.

The boot process gets up to the point where it says "Hostname: ....", then the three NOTICE: lines from the VBox kernel driver appear (kthread_t::t_preempt at 42, cpu_t::cpu_runrun at 216, cpu_t::cpu_kprunrun at 217). But then the box just hangs. If I wait long enough (don't remember the exact time, but on the order of 5-10 minutes, probably), the following prints on the console:

Code: Select all

WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci8086,105@1,1/pci1000,3020@0 (mpt_sas0): Disconnected command timeout for Target 9
WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci8086,1c1@1c,1/pci1000,3020@0 (mpt_sas0): Disconnected command timeout for Target 10
The system never seems to recover from that. I boot back into the boot environment that does not have the SUNWvbox package installed, the system works perfectly.

The key hardware in system is:
  • Intel S1200BTS motherboard, Xeon E3-1230 processor
    2 x LSI SAS9211-8I SAS/SATA HBAs (just doing JBOD with ZFS) - uses the mpt_sas driver
This happened with old firmware that my LSI cards shipped with, and I also updated them to the latest firmware (10.00.02.00) and it still occurs. It happens with both the IT and IR firmware loaded in the LSI cards.

Anything I can do to further diagnose where the problem is? Is there anyone out there successfully running VirtualBox 4.1.0 on a system with LSI 2008-based storage controllers?

Thanks,
Matthew
mwilson
Posts: 4
Joined: 3. Aug 2009, 23:21
Primary OS: Solaris
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Windows XP

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Post by mwilson »

BTW, I installed VirtualBox 3.2.12 on this host today and it seems to be running fine.
budy
Posts: 31
Joined: 1. Jul 2010, 17:51
Primary OS: OpenSolaris 11
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: MacOS, Linux

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Post by budy »

HI,

I am having exact the same issue. However, I don't have a be that doesn't contain VBox, so I need a possible workaround to get VBox 4.1 off this my host to get it working again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
budy


P.S. I managed to solve this by booting into single-user mode and removing VBox 4.1. Afterwards I installed 4.0.12 again.
Ramshankar
Oracle Corporation
Posts: 793
Joined: 7. Jan 2008, 16:17

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Post by Ramshankar »

Very strange indeed, I've not had reports about such a failure before.

Of course, this could be due to the new MP notification code that was introduced in 4.1, but I cannot say for sure without more information.

You could try booting up with kmdb enabled, add "-k" to the Solaris kernel command-line line in GRUB. The other thing you could try is to setup the deadman timer:

Code: Select all

To /etc/system add:
set pcplusmp:apic_kmdb_on_nmi=1
set snooping=1
set snoop_interval=60000000
snoop_interval is in microseconds, 60 seconds is sufficient. Reboot after adding these and see what happens when you boot it with vbox drivers enabled.
Oracle Corp.
plexor
Posts: 7
Joined: 23. Feb 2009, 15:10
Primary OS: OpenSolaris 11
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: Windows,CentOS, Debian & ArchLinux
Location: Forserum, SWEDEN
Contact:

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.1

Post by plexor »

I got the same problem. Downgraded to VBox 4.0.12 and that solved the problem.

/Plexor
cpcfreak
Posts: 3
Joined: 2. Aug 2008, 13:12

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.

Post by cpcfreak »

I had a similar problem after the last update, I could boot to the login screen but it would hang when I tried to login. I found it to be related to the 3D and Composition.

I logged into a terminal session and ran the gnome-cleanup utility on the problem accounts. After that all worked OK until we tried to turn desktop effects back on and the system hung.

It seems something in the last couple of Virtualbox updates has broken composition for Solaris Express 11 guests. I notice there was a Compiz fixed applied for Ubuntu in a recent update, maybe that is related to this problem. But that is just a guess!

I will try that Virtualbox downgrade trick to see if things come good, but it is a catch 22 situation because recent updates have solve a lot of problems for other guests OSs and performance has improved greatly for Linux guests like Debian or Suse.
cpcfreak
Posts: 3
Joined: 2. Aug 2008, 13:12

Re: Solaris 11 Express doesn't boot after installing VBox 4.

Post by cpcfreak »

OK, I just remembered to try an VBox Guest Tools update to match the VBox release and viola all 3D and composition is working again.

Silly me I have become lazy using Linux, because under Linux I don't have to manually remove the Guest Tools before I upgrade them. So I often leave Solaris running under old tools versions.
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