virtualbox.org

Hello,
I've got Virtualbox 6.1.16 with several Windows xp clients running without problems.
When I try to use a Windows 7 client (32 or 64 bit doesn't matter) it freezes after some random time.

I tried this several times and built new VMs to test it, but they keep on freezing.
Tried some adjustments from others with similar problems (more/less video RAM, different controller types, ...) but without real success.

Seems to me, as if the combination of Win 7 and this computer causes problems, as I don't have freezing Win 7 on any other VirtualBox host.

Thanks!

Couple of things I see, which seem to revolve around a really old processor virtualization-wise:

00:00:00.236019 Full Name: "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5450 @ 3.00GHz"

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... z-fsb.html

00:00:00.109152 HM: HMR3Init: VT-x
00:00:00.236071 Ept - Extended Page Tables = 0 (0)
00:00:00.236076 UnrestrictedGuest - Unrestricted guest = 0 (0)

That no-EPT might be a killer. (I picked this stuff up from forum guru 'fth0'.)

vbox.log file wrote:

01:12:42.042957 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007f0767284200 completed after 11 seconds
01:12:42.042997 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007f07673b67c0 completed after 11 seconds
01:12:42.043009 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007f07673f3540 completed after 11 seconds
[...]
01:20:05.712332 AsyncCompletion: Task 0x007f07673f3480 completed after 10 seconds
01:28:12.032266 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

There were some disk I/O problems, so I'd suggest to enable the Host I/O Cache in Storage > Controller: SATA.

Additionally, the vbox.log file contained several reboots and several VRDP connects, so it's not clear when the problem occurred and when not. Please try and reproduce the problem again, describe what you did from the VM start up to the problem occurring, and provide the corresponding VBox.log file.

scottgus1 wrote:That no-EPT might be a killer. (I picked this stuff up from forum guru 'fth0'.)

When the host CPU doesn't provide Extended Page Tables (EPT), VMs will often run considerably slower (I've once seen a factor of 10), and this could have all sort of consequences. If you want to see this for yourself, just take a VM and disable System > Acceleration > Enable Nested Paging.

Thank you for the answers!

I activated the I/O cache and did another run, where I started the VM and let it run until it freezed.
One VRDP connection to skip the 30sec from the bootscreen after a frozen OS, another connection at the end, to check it it's really frozen. I let the system run idle.

According to EPT:
The Xeon not having it means I will have performance losses with OSes >Win7 ?
I noticed with a Win10 test some time ago that it was terribly slow, but I didn't do any more tests as I don't need that OS.
Win 7 is a little bit slow in booting, but the rest does work quite smoothly. Win XP machines run very fluently.

L1800Turbo wrote:I activated the I/O cache and did another run, where I started the VM and let it run until it freezed.

VBox_20210101.log wrote:

00:43:07.349722 Event: forcefully unregistering passive event listener 00007f52f400efe0 due to excessive queue size
00:57:23.156345 VMMDev: vmmDevHeartbeatFlatlinedTimer: Guest seems to be unresponsive. Last heartbeat received 4 seconds ago

I'm still suspecting disk I/O: Where is /mnt/daten1 mounted from?

Regarding EPT, the older Windows OSs are probably not as memory intensive as Windows 10.

/mnt/daten1 is a regular SATA harddrive

Model: ATA WDC WD30EZRX-00M (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name  Flags
 1      1049kB  3001GB  3001GB  ext4

It's the drive where all the VMs are located. Did a hard drive check, but nothing noticeable.

In the VBox.log files, I don't see any other indications of "freezing" except the ones I've already mentioned. Is your problem worth the effort of further investigations?

Since "freezing" is no technical term, we could discuss and investigate this a bit more. What do you mean when you say "freezing"?

You could do some experiments: For example, let the guest OS continuously ping the host through a network connection, let the guest OS play audio in a continuous loop through a VRDP connection, and so on.