"Bad page state" messages when shutdown Centos

[ohaya]

Hi,

I have several Centos 4.8 (64 bit) guests. The VirtualBox tools are installed on them, and they work fine, except that when I try to shutdown a guest, I get an apparently un-ending stream of console messages. It's hard to catch them, but it looks like they say "Bad page state" or something similar.

These guests were migrated over from Vmware Workstation, i.e., the guests storage is pointing to VMDKs.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?

Thanks,
Jim

[Perryg]

Post the guests log file (as an attachment)
See Online Users Manual for the location of the file.

[ohaya]

Hi,

I'm attaching the VBox.log from one of the Centos guests...

Jim

[Perryg]

00:00:00.677560 Host RAM: 15938MB total, 178MB available
00:00:01.084622 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000100000000 (4 294 967 296, 4 GB)

This will not work as you are assigning more memory than you have available. Probably forcing a lot of swapping.

I also see the HDD = vmdk Are these transplants and did you remove the additions before you started using VirtualBox?

[ohaya]

Hi,

That log was just one of the guests at that time. I've had this problem even when running just one of the Centos guests. I'll check if the Vmware tools are still installed (I don't remember).

Thanks, and BTW, Happy New Year!

Jim

[Perryg]

Regardless you need to keep an eye on the memory. swap and thrashing tend to make for a lot of issues in a virtual guest.

[ohaya]

Hi,

Ok. I started from scratch, with a working VMWare guest. Then, in VMWare, I uinstalled the VMware tools, and shut the guest down.

Then, I created a new guest in VBox, with no drives.

Then, I copied the VMDKs from the VMware guest to the VBox guest directory.

Then, I added the VMDKs to the VBox guest.

However, when I try to start the VBox guest, I am getting a kernel panic. I'm attaching a screenshot of the VBox guest console, and also the VBox.log.

It actually worked better with my earlier attempt, where I didn't uninstall the VMware tools from the VMDK !!

Jim

[ohaya]

Here's the console screenshot...

[ohaya]

Hi,

OOPS! I had to change the SCSI adapter in the guest to "LSILogic" rather than "Bus Logic", and then it booted. I could have sworn that VMware defaults to LSI Logic for the adapter?

It's booting now, so I'll be adding the VBox additions and see if the shutdown problem happens.

Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

After I added the VBox additions, it does same thing (same problem) as before when I shutdown the guest... !!

Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

I found this:

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/8016

However, in my case, 3D acceleration wan't turned on, and also, the problem happens even if I disable preview in the VBox GUI.

Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

For the record: I spent last night upgrading the Centos guest from 4.8 to 5.4. I was semi-successful, i.e., I got a working Centos 5.4, and my apps worked on that, but some of the yum installs failed (apparently, some thing needed a very old libdb.so.2 from the Fedora *CORE* 6 repository, but I couldn't get the repo set up correctly).

Anyway, the interesting thing was that after that semi-successful upgrade, the shutdown looping problem was GONE!

So, it seems like the problem may be some incompatability of Centos 4.8 with the VBox 4.2.6.

Jim

[mpack]

So, it seems like the problem may be some incompatability of Centos 4.8 with the VBox 4.2.6.

Or an incompatibility with the hardware recipe of your VM.

[Perryg]

RHEL4, OEL4, CentOS 4 (32/64-bit) Works, with Additions Requires IDE Controller. 4.8+ Recommended if using VirtIO.

From the guests supported page. Probably explains the issue.

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes

[ohaya]

Hi,

That may be the reason, i.e., my Centos guests are, like the Win2K guests, were configured with SCSI hard drives by default by VMware.

Thanks,
Jim