virtualbox.org

This is my first time to encounter a problem where OSX 10.5.8 host crashes during the installation of linux guests in VirtualBox. It seems strangely hardware specific as everything seems fine on my home iMac but fails on my work iMac.

More specifically...

Running VirtualBox 3.2.8 on iMac 8,1 (3.02Ghz, Core2 Duo, 4GB ram, OSX 10.5.8 ) attempted installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition. I got to the point of copying files and I left the computer for a few minutes. I returned to a black screen and non-responsive system. I had to hold the power button to shut down the system.

Later I tried the install at home on my iMac 7,1 (2.4Ghz, Core2 Duo, 4GB ram) also VB 3.2.8 and OSX 10.5.8. Install went perfectly, except for guest additions. I upgraded virtualbox to 3.2.10 and resolved the issue with guest additions.

Back at work the next time I had the chance, I updated VB to 3.2.10 and reattempted the Linux Mint Debian edition install. During the process of copying files, I noticed the OSX clock on the menubar had stopped, and clicking on anything on the OSX desktop caused the spinning pinwheel to replace my mouse pointer. The dock would still hide and reveal but was non-responsive. I could not do a force-quit. After waiting about 30 minutes I had to power off and reboot to use my iMac.

Since then I have tried with similar results to install Ubuntu 10.10 and Kubuntu 10.10. I've tried monitoring the system with Activity Monitor and iStatPro, but can't see any spikes in processor usage when the system stops responding. I installed Linux Mint 9 a few weeks ago with no problems, so I tried to run a test install of LM9 today to see what would happen. It crashed as well - while copying files. In activity monitor I first noticed that "DashboardClient" stopped responding followed by "UserEventAgent" followed by "Finder" - by this point Activity Monitor would no longer update and the system was non-responsive.

Earlier this week I tried exporting my working virtual machines and uninstalling and reinstalling VB 3.2.10, but while my reimported VM's run just fine, I still have crashes trying to install into new ones. I've tried disabling processor acceleration (VT-x/AMD-V) but that didn't help. I'm not attempting to use PAE, since as I understand it, PAE wouldn't benefit me in a system with 4GB of memory.

Everything that has failed on my iMac 8,1 seems to work fine on my older iMac 7,1. I do realize all the linux versions I've tried are very close on the family tree, but that's all I'm familiar with - Ubuntu / Debian derivatives - but it's strange the Linux Mint 9 (Main/Gnome Edition) worked fine a few weeks ago, but now fails to install, yet a previously installed LM9 VM with identical configurations still seems to run just fine.

I'm stumped. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

Are you seeing any information in the VirtualBox logs or the console that might indicate what is going on? Any differences in the VB setting between the home and work machine? One thing you can try if you haven't already is to disable VT-x and see if that helps.

Sorry for the delay, but I haven't had much time to experiment with VirtualBox at work lately. I was in the office early today and thought I'd see what would happen. The crash situation has recurred - this time installing Linux Mint 10RC - once again during the process of copying files.

@rpmurray
Thanks for your suggestion. I left the VirtualBox log and Console running during the install to observe. Console logged one suspicious message in the "All Messages log": After that the system became non-responsive and neither the Console nor the VirtualBox log would refresh. After rebooting, there was one suspicious entry in the VirtualBox log: Performance impact! Definitely! Everything stopped responding.

Regarding VT-x - already tried that and didn't observe any difference.

Regarding differences in VB settings - I assume machine settings, I have made an observation: I attempted an install of Kubuntu 10.10 using a virtual machine I'd created using an earlier version of VirtualBox (I wish I remembered what version). I simply released the Hard Disk image attached to the machine and created a new image and installed Kubuntu 10.10 and I didn't have any problems, but this morning when I created a new VM from scratch with VB 3.2.10 it crashed just as before.

Any ideas?

Problem solved... hopefully.
Recent releases of VirtualBox create the primary boot drive on a virtual SATA controller. There's a checkbox option under Storage/SATA Controller/Attributes/Type: AHCI that says "Use host I/O Cache" as shown in the right column of the image below...



I believe that previous releases have had the "Use host I/O cache" option checked by default - at least I don't ever remember changing it - but now, at least with VirtualBox 3.2.10, this option is NOT checked by default.

So far, every time I've tried to install Linux (on my newer iMac with VB 3.2.10) into a VM without the "Use host I/O cache" option enabled, the install process has resulted in the Mac OS crashing as described above. Today, after finding this discrepancy, I checked the "Use host I/O cache" option on a newly created VM, and I was able to install Linux Mint Debian Edition with no problems. In fact, just for fun, I repeated the process and this time I was able to simultaneously install Linux Mint Debian Edition and Linux Mint 10RC into two different virtual machines (running at the same time on the same host) once again with no difficulties.

I believe my problem has been solved, and I hope this information helps someone.