Solaris 10 x64 hangs after period of inactivity

[woboyle]

I am leaving Solaris 10 x64 running in a VirtualBox VM, and after some period of inactivity (screensaver, etc are disabled), Solaris hangs and I have to do a hard shutdown and restart of the VM to get it back. I am running vbox 2.1.4 on an 8-core CentOS 5.2 x86_64 system. I have granted 1GB RAM to Solaris (out of 8 on the host) and the latest patched version of Solaris 10 x64 (the VT extensions are enabled on the host so it will run 64bit). My hardware is a custom box with Intel S5000XVN motherboard, dual E5450 Xeon processors, and 8GB of fully-buffered ECC RAM.

Fortunately, I don't seem to be losing any data, but this is aggravating. Has anyone experienced this behavior? Does anyone out there run Solaris x64 on a Linux 64bit host (RHEL, Suse, et al)? Is there anything I can do to get more info? If the OS has crashed, it doesn't seem to be emitting any on-screen messages, though I need to look more closely at the trace logs. Any suggestions as to which I should look at? Any system settings I can make that will enable more diagnostics for this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

-------------- Some Time Later -----------------

Well, it (the Solaris 10 VM) just hung while I was using it. I had just finished compiling a small utility (after building a whole bunch of others over about a 2 hour period) when it hung again. It reboots OK and the file system is clean - things appear normal in all other respects. It's just this incessant hanging that is driving me nuts! I don't have this problem with WIndows XP in a VirtualBox.

[sej7278]

yup i've had this exact same issue, but just because everyone doesn't have the issue, its not deamed a bug i guess - same goes for the fact that 32-bit solaris just won't install, or applying the latest patch cluster completely kills a 64-bit solaris 10u6 vm.....

solaris guest support is frankly rubbish.

[woboyle]

Well, it certainly isn't as robust as Windows and Linux guest support, that's for sure. One would think that Sun would consider guesting of Solaris, their own OS, would be a priority item to get spot on. I need it to be relatively stable so I can finish an IPC kernel driver and demonstrate some rule-processing software that needs the kernel driver on it. A successful demonstration will sell a lot of Solaris systems, especially in the x86 market. The software in question already run well on Sparc systems but face it, cost-conscious companies are mostly interested in commodity hardware these days.

[sej7278]

Well, it certainly isn't as robust as Windows and Linux guest support, that's for sure. One would think that Sun would consider guesting of Solaris, their own OS, would be a priority item to get spot on. I need it to be relatively stable so I can finish an IPC kernel driver and demonstrate some rule-processing software that needs the kernel driver on it. A successful demonstration will sell a lot of Solaris systems, especially in the x86 market. The software in question already run well on Sparc systems but face it, cost-conscious companies are mostly interested in commodity hardware these days.

i don't think many companies would be confident enough to run solaris on commodity x86 kit, everyone i know who uses x86 is using sunfire x-series, certainly not some generic dell or hp kit (unsupported hardware, single software+hardware vendor etc).

[woboyle]

i don't think many companies would be confident enough to run solaris on commodity x86 kit, everyone i know who uses x86 is using sunfire x-series, certainly not some generic dell or hp kit (unsupported hardware, single software+hardware vendor etc).

Actually, this is about non-generic as possible. All the relevant hardware is native Intel (motherboard, processors) or mainline gear (nVidia GeForce video, Seagate sata drives, Crucial memory), though it isn't Sun branded. However, the issue here isn't the hardware, but the guest os (Solaris 10) running on Sun's (now, anyway) VM. The target customers would as likely purchase Sun hardware as anything else, though enough of them would be interested in more generic or custom gear (cloud computing). Anyway, running Solaris on VirtualBox is about the only way that I can afford to provide a proof-of-concept demonstration of a Solaris network without purchasing a lot of gear I neither need nor can afford.

[sej7278]

Actually, this is about non-generic as possible. All the relevant hardware is native Intel (motherboard, processors) or mainline gear (nVidia GeForce video, Seagate sata drives, Crucial memory), though it isn't Sun branded.

wow, i really don't know anybody who would actually build their own servers to run solaris x86, all the corporate types want support contracts and such.

i guess if you're google or someone you can build and support your own linux cluster, but proper solaris isn't great on commodity - certainly not as good as opensolaris/express.

have you tried the new 2.2.0 beta 1, perhaps the solaris x86_64 support is better than in 2.1.4 ?

[woboyle]

i guess if you're google or someone you can build and support your own linux cluster, but proper solaris isn't great on commodity - certainly not as good as opensolaris/express.

have you tried the new 2.2.0 beta 1, perhaps the solaris x86_64 support is better than in 2.1.4 ?

I might try OpenSolaris. I just figured Solaris x86 proper would be more stable and compatible with sources developed for Solaris on Sparc (accounting for endian-ness of course).

[sej7278]

I might try OpenSolaris. I just figured Solaris x86 proper would be more stable and compatible with sources developed for Solaris on Sparc (accounting for endian-ness of course).

i've found opensolaris 2008.11 to work much better under virtualbox, but as you say, dunno what the incompatibilities with proper solaris and/or sparc architecture are.....

[woboyle]

Well, after some days working with it, it hangs pretty regularly after a couple of hours of use (or non-use). At least I am getting my porting work done - restarting the system isn't too time-consuming and I don't seem to be losing any work. I also take a snapshot at regular intervals, so recovery from something more dire shouldn't be too painful (I hope). Anyway, some feedback from Sun about this would be appropriate, IMO. People who use this tool are often early adopters, validating the tool for more general corporate deployment, so better attention to our complaints would not be remiss.

[sej7278]

Well, after some days working with it, it hangs pretty regularly after a couple of hours of use (or non-use). At least I am getting my porting work done - restarting the system isn't too time-consuming and I don't seem to be losing any work. I also take a snapshot at regular intervals, so recovery from something more dire shouldn't be too painful (I hope). Anyway, some feedback from Sun about this would be appropriate, IMO. People who use this tool are often early adopters, validating the tool for more general corporate deployment, so better attention to our complaints would not be remiss.

have you lodged a bug report?

[woboyle]

have you lodged a bug report?

I've been unable to find where to post them on the support pages for VirtualBox. Do you have a URL?

[vbox4me2]

Bugtracker

[woboyle]

Thanks for the bugtracker link. I'll post one - hopefully Sun will resolve this issue. Other than this, and the issue where installation of GuestAdditions for Solaris will corrupt my X server configuration, I haven't had any problems, so far at least.

[woboyle]

Well, looking in the bug list, this was reported 6 months ago as critical bug #2258 against VirtualBox 2.0.6. It seems related to running Solaris in 64-bit mode with the VT-x processor extensions enabled for the VM. I might try disabling them and seeing what happens.

[sej7278]

I bumped the bug too: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2258