(SOLVED) Anyone having issues with Virtio-SCSI?

[oso2276]

Hi folks,

I think there's could be an issue with Virto-SCI on a guest VM, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS running kernels 6.2.0-36 (hwe), 6.5.0-1006 (oem) and 6.5.10 (upstream). There are 8 cores allocated to the VM and 16GB RAM. EFI Boot, and file system is formatted with EXT4.

Host Running VB 7.0.12 on Ubuntu 23.10, Kernel 6.5.10 from upstream (but I seen the same happening with Ubuntu's own 6.5.0-10), on a Intel Alder lake i7-1260P, 64 GB RAM.

Issue, when the VM is running a process with lots of IO, In my case custom building a Linux kernel from upstream, the system will start reporting several EXT4 file write errors. After this point I have to restart to be able of keep using the VM.

To solve the issue I removed the virtio-scsi controller and replaced it with a LsiLogic controller and all was fine again afterwards.

Is virtio-scsi still considered experimental?

[scottgus1]

I recall that virtio had something off about it in 7.0, but that may have been the network virtio. I also remember virtio-scsi being mentioned in the forum, but I don't recall there was a happy ending. You could try a web-search or three with the site restrictor "site:forums.virtualbox.org" to see if you can find mentions.

[oso2276]

Hi folks, I also managed to identify the same virtio-scsi issues on a different machine running Win11 23H2/VB 7.0.12 and I faced the same issues. Guest VM at this time was 32 bits Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with kernel 6.1.62. Virtio-scsi also failed on FreeBSD 14 guests.

So simple as that, virtio-scsi it is not ready for prime time yet.

[rterzi]

I've run into errors and corruption with Virtio-SCSI too, VirtualBox 7.0.14 on RHEL 9.3, with RHEL 9.3 guest. I thought paravirtualized drivers were supposed to deliver improved performance/less overhead by reducing the amount of emulation needed.

I just found after searching, the current user manual in section 5.1 says "Currently virtio-scsi controller support is experimental." However this is in the text and not in a warning callout box.

However, Section 14.1, Experimental Features, doesn't list virtio-scsi as experimental.

Will follow up elsewhere with this, but since this thread was recent, wanted to post that info here in case someone else finds this.