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Host freezes

Posted: 17. Aug 2009, 16:22
by danmc
Hello,

I'm using VirtualBox 3.0.4 r50677, the AMD64 "All Distributions" version under Scientific Linux-4.8. The machine is a Dell Precision 490 with two dual core processors and 4 GB of RAM.

I have both a fedora 11 and windows xp guest setup.

What I'm observing is that rebooting the XP guest more often than not causes the host to crash.

WinXP guest settings:
- 192 Mb basememory
- enable ACPI
- not enable IO APIC
- 1 CPU
- not enable PAE/NE
- enable VT-x/AMD-V
- not enable nested paging
- 12 Mb video memory
- USB enabled as is EHCI controller

The symptom is that upon guest reboot, I'll get to the XP login in screen but the mouse pointer is gone and moving the mouse around doesn't do anything. At this point I may be able to ssh to the host machine. caps lock on/off works (keyboard has a caps lock light). After a short while (seconds to a minute or so) of fiddling with the mouse and kbd, the host totally dies. The screen remains, but the keyboard acts dead (caps lock does nothing) and I can no longer ping or ssh to the host. The only fix at this point is hit the power switch.

I have also observed this when I shutdown the fedora 11 guest. It gets part way through the shutdown and then the host just freezes and won't respond to mouse, kbd, or pings.

It's like virtualbox is somehow letting the guest reset some hardware that the host is still using.

Any ideas?

Thanks.
-Dan

Re: Host freezes

Posted: 17. Aug 2009, 17:13
by vbox4me2
WinXP guest settings:
- 192 Mb basememory
use 256 or 512
- not enable IO APIC
enable apic when using vt-x
- 12 Mb video memory
16mb
- USB enabled as is EHCI controller
disable for now

See what happens with these settings.

Re: Host freezes

Posted: 18. Aug 2009, 18:31
by danmc
I made those changes. All I have to do is tell the guest OS to shut down and the host hangs still. This seems to happen with either the WinXP guest or the Fedora 11 guest. Makes for an interesting challenge in terms of doing a clean shutdown of both guest and host!

This is frustrating because otherwise VirtualBox is running quite nicely.

-Dan

Re: Host freezes

Posted: 18. Aug 2009, 19:08
by vbox4me2
It might be a AMD thing, there are a few amd fixes in the pipeline for the next VBox version.