virtualbox.org

Hi!

I had VirtualBox 2.* on by Ubuntu 9.04/64 and WinXP SP3 32 bit guest for a long time. It was working OK. Recently I've upgraded to VBox 3.0.0 r49315 to give 2 CPUs to guest OS out of my 4 Penryn cores. At the same time I've updated WinXP kernel to a multiprocessor version. Since then I have periodic WinXP freezes, either on boot or during a normal operation. The only solution after the freeze is to kill guest OS either with reset or power down. At the moment of freeze the following line appears in the log several times:

00:00:50.434 PIIX3 ATA: Async I/O thread probably stuck in operation, interrupting

The following line also looks suspicious:

00:00:04.235 Guest Log: BIOS: int13_harddisk: function 02, parameters out of range 0000/0000/0001!

A full log of the hanged session is attached.

I've tried to search for a problem and apparently that seems many users had similar problems with previous versions of VBox, but the search found no solution.
UPD: I've tried to leave only a single CPU and disable IO APIC and VT-x, i.e. to restore the config, which was working with 2.2.4. This time guest Windows hanged just the same way at a boot time with int13 error messages in log file. But, this time VBox has also killed my host Ubuntu! I had to ssh to it and kill VirtualBox process. Before that my keyboard and mouse were not responding except to NumLock key.

UPD2: I've re-enabled IP APIC and VT-x, but this time gave only 1 CPU to guest. Windows still uses SMP kernel. That seems to work now. (int13 message is still in the log, but there is no message about PIIX3 ATA stuck.

I have a similar problem. Windows XP SP3 guest running under Ubuntu 9.04. Though my problems did not start after upgrading to virtualbox-3.0, it started after doing a Ubuntu system update.

Unlike the parent post, I cannot get my Windows guest to boot at all. While trying to boot in Safe Mode, it hangs at "Mup.sys" (CPU on the host maxes out), followed by a blue screen (continued with a maxed CPU). I have the same ATA and disk errors in the log. Experimenting with the different guest machine system settings doesn't fix anything. I've upgraded to virtualbox-3.0 and I have the same issues.

I also have a gentoo guest, which does not seem to have been affected by any of the software updates listed above.

I also have the same issue. although maybe not as severe as the two threads above. I am running Ubuntu 9.04 32bit, with WinXP as the guest. The guest environment locks up only cnrt(right)-delete (calling task manager) unfreezes XP then it locks up again a minute or two later.

I alter the VirtualBox settings back to 1 CPU and the issue is gone.

As a side note, I have been running VirtualBox daily for the past few years and didn’t notice any performance improvement from 1 CPU to 2 CPU’s. Based on system resources it appears the second CPU was not adding anything, except instability.