VirtualBox crashes Linux host

[Will Kemp]

This is a weird one and i'm not 100% certain that virtualbox is the cause. However, circumstantial evidence looks fairly conclusive.

I'm running Fedora 10 with a 2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64 kernel on a Lenovo Thinkpad R61. After upgrading to VirtualBox 2.1.0 (and continuing in 2.1.2), i started to experience system lockups after running VirtualBox. It wasn't straight after and there wasn't an immediately obvious connection, but it gradually became evident that it was related to VirtualBox. When i don't run VirtualBox, it doesn't happen. When i do run VirtualBox, it will happen sometime afterwards.

For a while i seemed to be having success with rmmod'ing the two vbox kernel modules. But that doesn't really work and the system will still crash most of the time.

What happens is that mouse movements become jerky and delayed. This is slight at first but gets worse, to the point where the whole sytem locks up. 'top' shows nothing untoward - no resource hogging happening, plenty of RAM free, normal number of processes. If i do a shutdown at that point, the system will appear to hang during shutdown, with some error messages that mean nothing to me (i've got screen shots - taken with a camera, as the system's unusable by this stage - but i can't see any way to attach them to this bug report, even though there's a check button to say i have...). I think if i leave it long enough after this point, it will continue to try and shutdown. I've seen it repeat disk error messages, but i haven't got any screenshots i'm afraid. I inevitably have to power it off.

I've uninstalled 2.1.2 and gone back to 1.6.6. I only installed that this morning and i've only used it for a while today - however, if i'd been running 2.1.2, i would expect it to have crashed by now, but it hasn't happened with 1.6.6

I'm afraid this is all a bit vague - but it's a difficult problem to get a handle on.

[Will Kemp]

screenshot of crash

[Will Kemp]

screenshot of crash - 2

[Will Kemp]

I found a way to attach the screenshots. I'd forgotten that there *are* some of the disk errors in the second screenshot after all.

[Frank Mehnert]

As we were never able to reproduce this bug I will close this bug. Please reopen this ticket if you still experience such problem with the latest release 2.2.2. Please attach the VBox.log file of the crashed session in that case.