AVG anti virus causing Guru Meditation

[jay22]

Hi, I am new here but have just had a real problem with AVG.

My system is a headless Windows 7 box that I use to run two VMs. One VM is a Debian based DNS server and the other is an openSUSE general purpose server running an SMTP and Web server along with another couple of services.

Yesterday I had to reboot the whole box and randomly got the openSUSE box going into guru meditation. Once it had failed restarting it simply made it fall over very quickly (in fact during boot). Rebooting the box allowed it to maybe run for an hour or so before falling over.

Quite by chance I started the VMs in reverse order (i.e. openSUSE first and then the Debian VM). Now it was the Debian VM that went into guru meditation and kept falling over until the Win7 host was rebooted.

The logs weren't that much help to me, probably my lack of ability at interpreting them.

After a lot of swearing and testing I removed AVG anti virus software (it had been updated on 27/03/2022 but not activated until the reboot yesterday on 05/04/2022). It now has run for the last 12 hours with no issues.

I put this post up so that it may help others if they are seeing the same issue and if anyone would like one of the log files, then do please just ask.

[mpack]

We're aware. We've been seeing similar reports for a few weeks now, always with old Win7 hosts, always with Avast or AVG third party AV installed. The change is that these AV packages (are they related?) seem to have added a new feature that uses VT-x/AMD-v, which of course makes them incompatible with any VM software.

[jay22]

OK, I did try a search of the forum for AVG but got no hits, so made my post.

There were references to VT-x in the log file so that all makes complete sense.

Thanks also for the Avast warning, I was about to install it as an AVG replacement!

[mpack]

If you can I would recommend that you try Windows Defender. MS are said to know a thing or two about the Windows OS, including how to defend it.

[fth0]

AV packages (are they related?)

FWIW, Avast owns AVG since 2016, but decided to keep both AV software companies and product lines.

[mpack]

Well, given the evidence I think they now share some code.

[mpack]

BTW, this:

OK, I did try a search of the forum for AVG but got no hits

The phpBB forum software does not index three letter words (or less). Google can often do a better job of searching the forums, i.e. with search terms "{keywords} site:forums.virtualbox.org".