[OpenIndiana-discuss] Yikes my new install is frozeup in Vbox

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-08-07 03:02, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Sorry about the line noise.  I always forget how much can be fixed on
> windows by a reboot.  It must be the most often rebooted OS on the
> planet.


Well, quite often killing some offending processes can also do the
trick ;) In case of VirtualBox, there are 3 or 4 VBox*.exe seen in
the Task Manager, and if your VMs are stopped and GUI is closed
these other helper processes should die off in a minute or so (not
instantly, though - they wait a bit for their "clients" to reconnect).
I guess something locked up in your processes, and these might need
to be killed off via Task Manager.

I believe you don't run VMs as services? There are also some bad
DCOM interactions which forbid running interactive (GUI and CLI)
and service'd VirtualBox programs simultaneously.

In VirtualBox per-machine folders there are also Logs/ where you
can review causes for the recent crashes. Mostly the text is quite
cryptic, sometimes just pointing to "Guru meditation", but there
might still be clues... perhaps, inability to reserve a contiguous
large stretch of virtual memory or somesuch.

Finally, FWIW, on a Windows server running a VirtualBox with a
Solaris installation, we had many problems with 4.2.* latest at
that time, which were resolved by reverting to 4.1.24(?) latest
also. In particular, with 4.2.* we had bad cases of timer skews
which can lead to effective lockups (things like sleeping stop
working when the clock jumps back and forth or has a "groundhog
day" altogether), and which were not fixed by settings recommended
in docs and on forums. Powering a VM off and on (not just resetting)
did work around the problem, but it cropped back up over a week...
There were indications that 4.1.* was more stable, we gave it a
shot, and have half a year of uptime. Well, had until last week,
when that server room overheated and went into thermal shutdown ;)

HTH,
//Jim Klimov