VirtualBox 5.0.x - VM aborts then will not start
Posted: 18. Aug 2015, 16:20
I have quite a few VBox VMs (18 at last count) which I use on a daily basis (some much more than others). The host is a MacBook Pro Retina 15" Core i7 Mid-2014 running Yosemite 10.10.5. The guests are Linux and Windows guests (various OS versions). I have been using this setup for nearly 1 year now. Previously I was running VirtualBox 4.3.28 but a couple of weeks ago I upgraded to VirtualBox 5.0.0 and then more recently to 5.0.2. Since upgrading to VBox 5.0 I have been having a very strange problem with one of my VMs; the guest OS is Oracle Linux 7.1 64-bit (same as some of my other VMs). Here are the symptoms...
VM will work fine for ages (often days, sometimes many hours) including save/restore state.
Suddenly the VM will abort (it just vanishes). There is nothing in the VBox logs (see examples attached). The VM is now marked as 'aborted' in the GUI.
All attempts to restart the VM fail; the VM begins to startup, I see the Linux messages about the smbus base address being uninitialised (virtually the first message that gets displayed during Linux boot) and then it aborts (disappears). Again nothing of any significance in the VBox.log file. However the OS X system log consistently shows this (corresponding to the VM abort time):
18/08/2015 10:54:12.967 VirtualBoxVM[1680]: VirtualBoxVM(1680,0x11eaa5000) malloc: *** error for object 0x7ff18270d3f8: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Which looks like a VBox 'use are free' bug maybe.
I am now unable to successfully start this VM. Other VMs (including Linux 7.1 VMs) start/restart and save/restore just fine. Even after a reboot of the host it still won't start. Typically if I leave it for a long time (usually overnight) it *may* start working again.
I have tried the latest VirtualBox test build (5.0.3 r102165) but it is just the same.
I'm totally perplexed as to what the problem could be here - it looks like a pretty fundamental VirtualBox bug but then why is no one else experiencing this and why does it only affect this VM?
The attached ZIP file contains the VM definition and a set of logs (the oldest one is the original 'abort' and all the newer ones are attempts to start the VM. Each start attempt results ion the OS X system, log message I mentioned above.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I really need to get this VM working.
Thanks,
Chris
VM will work fine for ages (often days, sometimes many hours) including save/restore state.
Suddenly the VM will abort (it just vanishes). There is nothing in the VBox logs (see examples attached). The VM is now marked as 'aborted' in the GUI.
All attempts to restart the VM fail; the VM begins to startup, I see the Linux messages about the smbus base address being uninitialised (virtually the first message that gets displayed during Linux boot) and then it aborts (disappears). Again nothing of any significance in the VBox.log file. However the OS X system log consistently shows this (corresponding to the VM abort time):
18/08/2015 10:54:12.967 VirtualBoxVM[1680]: VirtualBoxVM(1680,0x11eaa5000) malloc: *** error for object 0x7ff18270d3f8: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed.
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Which looks like a VBox 'use are free' bug maybe.
I am now unable to successfully start this VM. Other VMs (including Linux 7.1 VMs) start/restart and save/restore just fine. Even after a reboot of the host it still won't start. Typically if I leave it for a long time (usually overnight) it *may* start working again.
I have tried the latest VirtualBox test build (5.0.3 r102165) but it is just the same.
I'm totally perplexed as to what the problem could be here - it looks like a pretty fundamental VirtualBox bug but then why is no one else experiencing this and why does it only affect this VM?
The attached ZIP file contains the VM definition and a set of logs (the oldest one is the original 'abort' and all the newer ones are attempts to start the VM. Each start attempt results ion the OS X system, log message I mentioned above.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I really need to get this VM working.
Thanks,
Chris