Debian virtual machine in guru meditation

[diegopanepo]

Hello,
Today I tried to start my virtual machine, Debian 13, but it showed a message of critical error, saying it went into meditation. The popup window asked asked me to post the VBox.log file in this forum. Could anyone help me with this one? Is there a way to solve the problem?

[mpack]

The error is VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED.

Do you have any other running VM software on this host? E.g. Docker or QEMU instances running?

[diegopanepo]

No there aren't other virtual machines running, but maybe other softwares?
How do I make sure?

[klaus]

Really a weird one... the very first instruction to be executed inside the VM can't be run with VT-x, which the CPU reports as available with the expected features of a 11th gen Core i CPU. These CPUs are very widespread because they're a few years old.

[klaus]

Ah, fth0 pointed out that this smells just like the other, similar reports which happen when KVM is active. Check with "lsmod" if the modules "kvm" and "kvm_intel" are loaded. As long as they're there (used by QEMU and other hypervisors built on top of KVM) then VirtualBox can't work.

[fth0]

Another hypervisor (e.g. QEMU/KVM) is already running on the Linux host, and VirtualBox cannot run a VM at the same time.

On a Linux host, you can use "lsmod | grep kvm" to find out if the kvm_intel or kvm_amd module is currently in use, "lsof | grep /dev/kvm" to potentially find users of /dev/kvm, and "dmesg | grep -i kvm" to potentially find more information.

[diegopanepo]

Ok so I think I had this issue because I run an Android emulator in Qt, which needs virtualization.
I closed everything, restarted the PC and the VM is back on.
Thank you very much.

[fth0]

You're welcome, and thanks for reporting back!

PS: Klaus already guessed that it might also be Intel's HAXM, which is used by some Android emulators.

[klaus]

Strange. HAXM is supposedly able to get along with VirtualBox by "freeing VT-x" when it isn't using it on a given CPU thread/core.

On related news, the dev working on the fix of the detection of other hypervisors is making progress. Should be the case that the next release will again give a more useful error message (it won't be able to tell you which hypervisor is in the way) instead of the very cryptic guru meditation.