System instability - OS X kernel panics - with 4.1.x?

[hank]

No more kernel panics for me since dropping down from 4.1.2 to 4.0.14 (Lion 10.7.2).

I went to 12GB of RAM; nothing new showed up in the Diagnostic Reports since Jan.1st.

Haven't dared 4.1.8 yet as I do like having more than one VM open at a time, which seemed risky.

EDIT 1-14 -- what the heck, trying 4.1.8 over the weekend.

[hank]

No joy; 12GB of RAM, Lion 10.7.2, seemed mostly to handle three Windows VMs okay for going on 24 hours, with starting and stopping one or two or all three, letting Windows update itself, not doing much else. Then crashed just as I shut down one of the three. looking in Console I find there had been one previous crash I hadn't even noticed, likely when the VM showed an 'abort'. These are 'localhost crashes' not kernel panics; figured it was probably relevant here to someone who knows what's going on.

[hank]

OSX 10.7.3 seems to have resolved some of the problems.
I'm able to use Win7 VM -- one at a time -- ok now, with VBox 4.1.8.

[jglogan]

Anyone seeing crashes after VM shutdown with 4.1.10?

Though I now tend to avoid running more than one VM concurrently due to this issue, there are times where I can't avoid it, and I haven't seen a host panic yet. It looks like there were a few VMM fixes in the new release, so I'm hoping one of those addressed this problem.

[corrosion]

Hello all,
I'm using 4.1.10, I left my mac updating a newly installed Fedora16 KDE edition and when I came back my mac whas crashed.
I attach the log.
Regards all,

[jglogan]

I've now seen one panic so far with 4.1.10, and the panic dump is posted to https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9897.

[hank]

I see 4.1.12 is out -- I'm waiting to see if this looks better before upgrading.

[jglogan]

I haven't had a problem yet with 4.1.12, but I also upgraded to Lion recently, so the improved stability could have come from that.

[hank]

Have you been able to run more than one Windows guest at a time, and open and close one or both of them, without problems?

I haven't seen kernel panics in quite a while, but I do still see 'localhost' crashes -- here's the most recent (VBox 4.1.8 )

In VBoxManager these show the VM as "Aborted" -- reopening and reclosing the VM seems to clear that up.

So I'm eager to try 4.1.12, if this stuff isn't happening to others.

[jglogan]

I've been running trouble-free with a mix of Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 8 guests after my Lion upgrade. I believe I went from 10.6.8 to 10.7.3.

I see the final state of my VM as "Aborted" often after system shutdown completed, and I'm pretty sure there's a localhost crash dump associated with each of these. AFAICT these don't affect the system at all, though - they've never occurred while my system is still running.

So, for me this particular issue seemed to be specific to 10.6.x. I never ran 10.7 before 10.7.3, so I can't comment on whether the panic-on-shutdown problem is an issue there.

[hank]

For those using 4.1.16 and OSX 10.7.4--- is 4.1.16 at least no worse than the earlier versions of VBox for this issue?

As long as it's behaving OK with one guest VM at a time I'm itching to change up from 4.1.12, having skipped 4.1.14 waiting and hoping this crash after exiting with several VMs open would go away.

Edit -- ok, after another kernel panic trying two VMs under 4.1.12 in a moment of foolish optimism, I'm going ahead with 4.1.16 in the hope it can't have gotten any worse.

More news if it happens.