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Random freezing of Windows XP guest on Mac OS X host w/ SMP

Posted: 9. Jul 2009, 03:15
by Kal
I have upgraded to VirtualBox 3.0.0 recently and have decided to try out its new SMP capability with my existing Windows XP Pro 32-bit guest, which was created using VirtualBox 2.2.x.

So I tried assigning 2 processors to the guest, as my MacBook Pro Unibody Core 2 Duo (Penryn) has 2 cores. I booted up the guest and Windows detected multiple cores, so it proceeded to switch to the multiprocessor kernel. It rebooted and the performance was really neat, it was much more responsive than when it used only 1 core. Unfortunately, I discovered that the guest would also randomly freeze. I was able to move the Windows mouse cursor, the guest did not respond to any other input. After a few retries, I was forced to switch back to 1 processor. :(

Is anybody else experiencing the same problem? Is a fix on the way?

Re: Random freezing of Windows XP guest on Mac OS X host w/ SMP

Posted: 23. Jul 2010, 04:56
by ckteo
Yes, I experience the same problem as yours. But my setup is different. I am running virtualbox 3.2.6 on windows 7 64 bit as host and my guest is Fedora 13.
Everything's fine for single processor. Once you allocate more than 1 processor to the guest, it will just freeze / hang randomly. My CPU is Intel Core i5-430M.

Re: Random freezing of Windows XP guest on Mac OS X host w/ SMP

Posted: 23. Jul 2010, 15:18
by Perryg
It has been my experience that switching the processor to multiprocessor from single processor is problematic at best in Windows.
The two options that you have are to either reinstall with the options set to two processors or check it against this http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... u+download . Some have had success with HALu so that might be where you want to start.