VirtualBox 5.1.6 abort after installing new AMD GPU

[aanderson]

I upgraded from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 a couple of months ago and the graphical performance of VirtualBox dramatically decreased. I was using an AMD R7 250X 2GB card to render 4K and with Ubuntu 16.04 the old AMD catalyst graphics drivers were no longer supported and the opensource radeon driver was sub par. Today I installed a new AMD RX480 4GB card and also installed the latest AMDGPU pro driver version 16.30.3. I started up a WIndows 10 64bit guest VM and observed the UI responsiveness had dramatically improved. However right after I submited my credentials for login the VM aborted. I restarted the VM again and it aborted so I restarted in safe mode and re-installed the guest additions with both 2D and 3D support enabled. After the re-install I was able to log into the desktop but after a couple of minutes the VM aborted again. Nothing was in the VBox.log file but I found the following several of times in the output of dmesg:

Code: Select all

[  436.515336] vboxdrv: ffffffffc0871020 VMMR0.r0
[  436.816388] vboxdrv: ffffffffc07a8020 VBoxDDR0.r0
[  436.920760] vboxdrv: ffffffffc0006020 VBoxEhciR0.r0
[  838.183073] VDMA[3715]: segfault at 4 ip 00007f8f9a097cc0 sp 00007f8f7d3a9c30 error 4 in libdrm_amdgpu.so.1.0.0[7f8f9a096000+a000]
[  838.183166] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0: GPU fault detected: 146 0x04026014
[  838.183171] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_ADDR   0x0011C080
[  838.183173] amdgpu 0000:01:00.0:   VM_CONTEXT1_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS 0x0B060014
[  838.183175] VM fault (0x14, vmid 5) at page 1163392, write from 'CB0' (0x43423000) (96)

This is probably and AMD proprietary driver problem but I thought I would share in case others encountered the same issue.

[aanderson]

I went ahead and posted this issue to the AMD driver support forum so hopefully they will resolve it in the next driver release. I was able to disable 3D acceleration on the VM guest while leaving 2D acceleration enabled and the guest is able to run without issue.

As a side note the graphics card update was well worth it and the Windows 10 guest and host are extremely responsive at 4k as compared to the R7 250 card I was using before.