VB Bug: linux guest crashes when 3D acceleration enabled

[HaroldFinch]

...but anything much beyond turning a PC on seems to be an advanced skill for many.

I am not remotely that bad!

That said, there is a reason why I first looked into loukingjr's suggestion to use the latest guest additions, instead of mhanor's suggestion to download the latest Intel drivers: my system has a Dell utility that is supposed to tell me of all hardware driver updates. I always update whenever something becomes available. So, I have assumed that my box is actually up to date as far as drivers go.

That may be a bad assumption: maybe my Dell utility is not working correctly. Or maybe Dell is very conservative about pushing out updates from Intel.

I will try to look into this tonight. Stay tuned.

[loukingjr]

I am not remotely that bad!

I didn't mean you.
There are new Intel Drivers as of 1/2015 but I don't know if Dell reports them. I also don't know if it will fix your problem. My Linux box has integrated Intel HD 4600 graphics and I haven't had an issue but your results may vary.

[HaroldFinch]

OK, I manually started Dell System Detect several minutes ago (it normally runs periodically automatically), and it has not reported that my system has any driver that needs updating. So, I am guessing that hardware drivers are probably not the issue.

Another factor: I am currently using the latest VB (4.3.22) and Xubuntu (14.10), but this was a recent upgrade this last week. Before I was using the last stable VB release (4.3.20 or .18?) and Xubuntu 14.04. With that prior software, I had no issue on the same hardware Enabling 3D acceleration. Only with the new software. So, I would guess that the bug is caused by one of the new software components.

[loukingjr]

I can't say. I've been using 4.3.22 on OSX and Linux hosts without issues and now 4.3.24.I have no Windows hosts. Maybe someone else knows.

[HaroldFinch]

I can't say. I've been using 4.3.22 on OSX and Linux hosts without issues and now 4.3.24.I have no Windows hosts. Maybe someone else knows.

I just upgraded to 4.3.24 from 4.3.22, and the bug is still present.

I also think that the local version of Dell System Detect on my workstation is not working properly. It is failing to tell me of hardware updates which I know exist (I used the web version of Dell System Detect and it found some hardware updates for my box). I called Dell's workstation report, and am starting to work with one of their engineer's to figure out why this is happening, so stay tuned...

[HaroldFinch]

I can't say. I've been using 4.3.22 on OSX and Linux hosts without issues and now 4.3.24.I have no Windows hosts. Maybe someone else knows.

I just upgraded to 4.3.24 from 4.3.22, and the bug is still present.

I also think that the local version of Dell System Detect on my workstation is not working properly. It is failing to tell me of hardware updates which I know exist (I used the web version of Dell System Detect and it found some hardware updates for my box). I called Dell's workstation report, and am starting to work with one of their engineer's to figure out why this is happening, so stay tuned...

Update: I upgraded VirtualBox to 4.3.28 r100309 the other day, and today I did a clean install of Xubuntu 15.04.

Same exact bug happens if I try to enable 3D acceleration.

[IanSudbery]

I have exactly the same hardware, and experience similar problems, except that I can't event get as far as the desktop (I'm using Unity rather than XFCE).

My drivers are the latest ones as far as I can tell:
10.18.14.4170

I'm running VBox 5.0.0 and guest additions 5.0.0 r101573

The VM is Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit
4 CPUs
10GB of RAM,
128Mb video RAM

But i've also tried it on a similar spec VM running CentOS 7.

I include my log file.

[loukingjr]

I have exactly the same hardware, and experience similar problems, except that I can't event get as far as the desktop (I'm using Unity rather than XFCE).
The VM is Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit
4 CPUs
10GB of RAM,
128Mb video RAM

You have nearly all your available RAM assigned to the guest and all your CPU cores. Neither is a good idea. Try setting RAM to 4MB at the most and 2 CPUs.

[IanSudbery]

You have nearly all your available RAM assigned to the guest and all your CPU cores

10 out of 16 is only just over half and windows runs fine with only 4GB free, and here it has 6GB, In fact i've been considering adding more RAM to the system so that I can assign more the the VM, as 10GB isn't quite enough for what I use it for (data analytics). I'll admit that the CPUs might be overdoing it a bit, I've never been quite sure how things work with hyperthreading: the system has 8 logical cores. Anyway, CPU contention never seems to be a problem and the system runs absolutely fine with 3D acceleration switched off: In fact it runs better than the bare-metal i7 machine I used to run at my old job.

I will try it with less RAM and CPU, just to see if that is what is messing with the 3D acceleration, but that wouldn't be a long term solution.

[Perryg]

00:00:02.394641 Host RAM: 16292MB total, 12889MB available
00:00:03.338545 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000280000000 (10 737 418 240, 10 GB)

You need to remember that you can not talk about the amount of installed RAM as the host is going to be using some of it. See above and you can see this in the top of any of your log files.

00:00:03.338542 NumCPUs <integer> = 0x0000000000000004 (4)
00:00:04.004864 CPUM: Physical host cores: 4

What Lou was talking about is the amount of cores, not hyper-threads. VirtualBox uses cores. Assigning all of the cores to the guest leave nothing for the host and it can under load cause the host and guest to hang while doing handoffs.

[IanSudbery]

00:00:02.394641 Host RAM: 16292MB total, 12889MB available
00:00:03.338545 RamSize <integer> = 0x0000000280000000 (10 737 418 240, 10 GB)

Thats about what I said: Windows uses about 4GB in normal operation (I've currently got Outlook, 4 Firefox tabs, three word documents and 5 PDFs open, along with my PDF management software, and i'm using exactly 4GB RAM on the host. That leaves a full 50% headroom on windows' requirements.

What Lou was talking about is the amount of cores, not hyper-threads. VirtualBox uses cores. Assigning all of the cores to the guest leave nothing for the host and it can under load cause the host and guest to hang while doing handoff

I did some reading around this when I was first setting up the machine, I though there was no correspondence between virtual cores and physical cores? So its possible to assign 4 cores to the VM and the instructions will be passed back to the host to be execute on which ever CPU resource becomes available. Is this not right? I've been using this VM for about 6 hours a day every day for the last 7 months without any problems apart from the 3D acceleration.

Any way, I took your advice, and cut the RAM down to 4GB and put the cores to 2. Still crashes with the same error message as soon as it tries to switch to the full resolution display.

Log file attached

[mpack]

I did some reading around this when I was first setting up the machine, I though there was no correspondence between virtual cores and physical cores?

On what basis did you believe that? The difference between a VM and a simulator is that in a VM the guest code runs directly on the host CPU. There are no "virtual cores". However, the VM can be restricted to use a subset of available physical cores, leaving the host free use of what remains. This will guarantee good responsiveness from the host, which in turn better ensures good response from the guest - because it often needs to wait for the host to do something.

Btw, there is no need to guestimate your host's RAM usage: it's right there in the log file. The host is evidently using around 3GB right now, leaving 13GB available. If you allocate around 50% of he latter (and you should consider whether even that is necessary) then you would be allocating around 6-8GB to the guest.

[Perryg]

Code: Select all

00:00:24.751955 VMMDev: Guest Log: 00:00:00.043949 automount Error: VBoxServiceAutoMountWorker: Could not mount shared folder "WinHome" to "/media/sf_WinHome": No such device (19)

You should fix the above error although it probably is not causing your issue.

Now you say it crashes when you enter full screen ( host+F ) correct? Can you define what you mean by crash? Does the guest abort, lock-up, Etc..

[mhanor]

IanSudbery, use Process Explorer from Sysinternals to take a small memory dump of the crashed VirtualBox process (you can identify it by the higher memory usage), compress it and attach it here. Have you tried VirtualBox 4.3.28/4.3.30?

[IanSudbery]

Now you say it crashes when you enter full screen ( host+F ) correct? Can you define what you mean by crash? Does the guest abort, lock-up, Etc..

Its not quite when I enter full screen - the VM is confitgured to default to full screen, more when the VM switches from the low res bootloader (only using the centre of the screen), to using the whole screen. I assume this is when the proper graphics drivers are started. This would fit with the end of the log: the last thing it records is a query as to the openGL capabilities.

The crash is as identified by the OP: I get a model dialog titled "VirtualBox.exe Application Error" and containing the text: The instruction at 0x54d43195 referenced memory at 0xfda87468. The memory could not be read. Click OK to terminate the program". Clicking okay does indeed close the VM.

IanSudbery, use Process Explorer from Sysinternals to take a small memory dump of the crashed VirtualBox process (you can identify it by the higher memory usage), compress it and attach it here.

Unfortunately I get "Error Opening Process: Access is denied", on all but the smallest and most top level process. I assume thats not the one you wanted, but I include the dump anyway, just in case.

You should fix the above error although it probably is not causing your issue.

Yeah, i've got a bunch of messed up automounts from when I was trying to find the best way to mount all my storage.

On what basis did you believe that?

I think the most useful thing I read was this
http://www.altaro.com/hyper-v/hyper-v-v ... explained/ I know its hyper-V, not VB (I was benchmarking the to against each other at the time), but it kind of makes out its the same in all the modern hypervisors.

See also http://envobi.com/post/virtualbox-hyper ... -surprise/
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wik ... essor.aspx

The only time I've ever had the guest seriously slow the host was when the it was hammering the hard disk.