[OpenIndiana-discuss] VBox induced kernel panic

[Reginald Beardsley]

I'm running VBox 5.2.4 on Hipster 2017.10.   It has kernel panicked twice today on a null pointer dereference.

Both panics were the result of trying to mount a SanDisk 16 GB flash drive in a Debian 9.3 VM.  The flash drive is formatted FAT32 with a single file in the top directory and was last used to install firmware on an oscilloscope which required this arrangement.

The SanDisk drive mounts just fine in Hipster.  A  4 GB trade show give away drive mounts and unmounts just fine in Debian.  But the SanDisk has a problem.

I only recently finished setting this up, so I have very little experience with the VBox arrangement, though it seemed to work satisfactorily once I got past some VBox issues.  The  VBox forum crowd seems to be entirely Windows and Linux centric.  Moreover, my understanding is that the USB drivers are part of the Oracle additions.

I have core dumps and would like to inform the appropriate people.  There are obviously at least two errors. VBox is not checking what it passes to the kernel and Illumos is not checking that what it gets from VBox is valid.

I shall try updating to the latest VBox later today, but I thought I should raise the Hipster side of the issue here.  The SanDisk drive apparently has some problem as Win 7 Pro in a VM is unable to mount it.  However, it does not induce a kernel panic when I attempt it.