virtualbox.org

Hi folks,

I wanted to share some experience that I recently had with Virtual Box. After doing a brand new clean install of an Ubuntu 12.04 client OS under a Windows 7 host everything worked fine until I installed the VBox Guest Additions 4.1.22. After that the Ubuntu guest OS had a number of problems. Shutting down the guest OS for example caused the VirtualBox window to hang. I also found that my Firefox browser would not start properly but only display a grey window. I had also found that running the CInnamon desktop manager under another Ubuntu 12.04 installation caused high CPU loads (> 100%). I tried a number of changes on my Guest OS' to no avail. When I finally wen ahead and uninstalled the VBox Guest Additions, all my aforementioned problems went away. I was able to reproduce this issue with several Ubuntu 12.04 guest installations consistently. Each time after I installed the Guest Additions the guest OS would have shutdown problems. As soon as I removed the Guest Additions, the problems went away. I hope this will get fixed with the next VBox update.

Cheers.
Mitch

Hi folks,

So I tried a number of variations on this problem. I installed the 4.2 version and the Ubuntu 12.04 VM worked fine as long as the Guest Additions were not installed. As soon as I installed the guest additions, Firefox stopped responding (shows grey screen of death) and the VM hangs on shutdown. As soon as I remove the Guest Additions, both Firefox and shutdown processes work fine again. I tried this also with VirtualBox 4.1.22, and 4.1.20. All had the same effect. I will try 4.1.18 next.

I also tried running Virtualbox with Admin privileges under Windows and that did not have any effect on the problem either. I also messed around with the chipset settings (PIIX3 vs ACH9) which had no effect on the problem. I have attached a zip file with the last four log files. Maybe someone much smarter than me can figure out what is going on. Here is the information about my setup.

HP Laptop
Host OS: Windows 7 - 64Bit
Guest OS: Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit desktop
Physical Memory on Host: 8GB
Guest OS Memory Allocation: 2 GB (tried 4GB as well)
Physical CPU: AMD A6-3410MX
Graphics: Radeon HD Graphics

Does the host PC have the dual graphics driver. One low and one high graphics? Usually located in bios IIRC.
Try setting it to high only and see if it helps.

Perryg,

There is no dual graphics driver. I checked the bios and did not see anything about graphics settings. The host machine is a laptop from HP (I should have mentioned that before). I also have a few other Linux virtual machines that are Ubuntu 10.4 LTS and those VMs have no trouble at all. I seems to be just the 12.04 version that is causing issues. Of course I am always open to the idea that I have something misconfigured, but there are not that many settings that one can modify in the admin console for VirtualBox.

I am going to try older versions of VirtualBox and see if this persists in any of them. I am not sure what else to try at this point. Thanks for your input though. It is very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Mitch

Well I wouldn't go for an older version as that will probably not support the newer xorg of Ubuntu 12.04.
I assume you are using Unity and have the 3D accelerator enabled in the display section of the guest settings. Please correct me it it is not.

I believe this to be related to the hosts graphics adapter being the AMD radeon since that is basically where I see this issue.

What you can do to see for sure is run the following tests in the Ubuntu guest:
/usr/lib/nux/unity_support_test -p

Perryg,

You were absolutely correct. Running the unity_support_test showed that the environment did not support 3D. Once I turned off the 3D setting on the Guest OS, everything worked like a charm. Firefox opened as advertised and the shutdown process no longer hangs on the guest additions. Thanks a lot for your help.


Cheers,
Mitch