virtualbox.org

Hello all,

not sure 100% where to put this, and couldn't find anything online, so I'm going to post here and cross post on avast. While I know we all have our personal AV choices, I'm going to focus on Avast AV both Free and Avast One Free, both appear to now show this problem and I can replicate/resolve it 100%. This impacted all Guest VM's i have including those that are not multi-cpu (more than 1+) and do not use AMD-V. This should be the same for Hyper-V/Intel. The issue is Avast has the ability to flag the OS's virtualization on and kick out any application that is making use of it. this will result in Guest VM's not being able to execute and will generally get an error that looks like the one below from VirtualBox Logs.

for some reason the anti-exploit and anti-rootkit BOTH use HW-Virtualization or at least, overwrites the Host OS's virtualization flag to enabled and takes ownership of it.
Disabling the features OR uninstalling does not CLEAR the flag, a reboot is the only way.

This issue is only related to Avast AV and running Guest OS's. I assume your BIOS/Host OS is setup correctly for HW Virtualization support.

VCPU0: Guru Meditation -4054 (VERR_SVM_IN_USE) There are currently, 2 workarounds.
1. Uninstall Avast and Reboot, you must reboot after uninstalling.
2. Update the Avast settings outlined in the screenshots to -> DISABLED/UNCHECKED and Reboot, all 3 options must be unchecked/disabled and a reboot.

Thanks for your advice, Tormented! We have seen this too. Quite a few Avast and AVG users are having trouble because the 3rd-party AV turns on hardware virtualization scanning. BitDefender has done it too. I have heard Avast bought AVG or vise versa.

We have not experienced that turning off the root kit and exploit shields are necessary, only the hardware-assisted Virtualization. Will keep the other settings in mind if someone has further trouble.

Update: other users are also finding that disabling the rootkit shield is becoming necessary too. Avast is apparently aware of this issue and is working on it.