Virtualbox 7.2 Linux Guests keep freezing

[tinfoil-hat]

Hi, I have installed Virtualbox 7.2 on LMDE7 via their apt-repo:

deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/oracle-virtualbox-2016.gpg] https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian trixie contrib

My Linux GUI Guests keep freezing after some hours. I tried to disable suspend and standby mode, as well as screensaver. Also I installed the Linux Guest additions via official Repos from Debian Arch and Fedora. And the Virtualbox Extention Pack on the host.

It happens on Debian, Arch and Fedora VMs

Please let me know, if you need further information.

- thanks

 

[bob466]

How much installed Ram does your computer have. ?

I have 16GB of Ram...you should never give the VM more than half the installed Ram.
I have only one VM at the moment...I gave it 6GB of Ram.

If I had several VMs I'd give each 6GB of Ram but I wouldn't run them all at the same time because this would cause problems.

 

[jpnilson]

I would ask what you mean by freezing. For example can you access various vms via ssh? Do you see anything in syslog after rebooting your guests? Would be good to know host resources and how many guests you have, resources allocated etc. On the host you may also check for OOM condition. Lots of possibilities...

 

[tinfoil-hat]

How much installed Ram does your computer have. ?

I have 16GB of Ram...you should never give the VM more than half the installed Ram.
I have only one VM at the moment...I gave it 6GB of Ram.

If I had several VMs I'd give each 6GB of Ram but I wouldn't run them all at the same time because this would cause problems. View attachment 29187

Hi, i have 64GB RAM and don't allocate more than I have

 

[tinfoil-hat]

I would ask what you mean by freezing. For example can you access various vms via ssh? Do you see anything in syslog after rebooting your guests? Would be good to know host resources and how many guests you have, resources allocated etc. On the host you may also check for OOM condition. Lots of possibilities...

Didn't try to ssh into one, good idea! what logs do you think of?

 

[bob466]

Hi, i have 64GB RAM and don't allocate more than I have

I've had upto 3 VMs but only one running...you could try increasing the video memory to 256MB.

Copy name of Virtual Machine eg...Mint Cinnamon 20.3...close Virtualbox and open a Terminal and type this command...

vboxmanage modifyvm "Mint Cinnamon 20.3" --vram 256

Note type command...do not copy and paste because it wont work.

I always run the checksum of ISOs before I install them in Virtualbox.

 

[jpnilson]

Didn't try to ssh into one, good idea! what logs do you think of?

I find that sometimes if there is a network hickup rdp will cause freeze. As long as you have installed ssh server I would merely try to login. Also immediately after restarting things I would try looking at syslog and journalctl -xe to see if the system reveal something.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

vboxmanage modifyvm "Mint Cinnamon 20.3" --vram 256

Hi, I already tried to increase the VRAM without success

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Since you found no solution since yesterday then it's time to use something more natural for Linux like qemu, virt-manager.

I can't say you won't XP same issue, it happened to me on few occasions as well with quemu after guest was running for longer time.
It appears to happen when guest is idle or when you do nothing with it.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

Since you found no solution since yesterday

well, I have to wait for the VM to freeze, so that I can troubleshoot

 

[CaffeineAddict]

I have to wait for the VM to freeze, so that I can troubleshoot

That sucks, you need to find a repro step to repro on demand.

If I'm you I'd try with leaving guests completely idle and not using them at all for X minutes, then try interacting.
Increment X between tries.

To lave a guest idle you want UI to run on a separate virtual desktop if you have it.
Then you also want to see what happens when screen goes off on host and you turn it back on.

This are just 2 examples I can thing of RN.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

That sucks, you need to find a repro step to repro on demand.

If I'm you I'd try with leaving guests completely idle and not using them at all for X minutes, then try interacting.
Increment X between tries.

That's what I am doing

To lave a guest idle you want UI to run on a separate virtual desktop if you have it.

I am also doing that

when the next crash happens I try to ssh into it and if this doesn't work, I'll reset it and check the logs. Do you have an idea what logs would be the most interesting?

 

[CaffeineAddict]

Do you have an idea what logs would be the most interesting?

After crash run sudo lnav -r /var/log

Will list everything, including things that journalctl won't tell you.
Red lines represent errors and yellow warnings.

All logs are grouped and sorted chronologically so you can find an exact cause.
With this method I've diagnosed 99% of all problems I had.

Now, since the freeze already happened you don't need to wait for it to happen again, simply run the above command again and scroll to time when the freeze happened and it should tell you.

The logs should pin point the error on the host.

 

[bob466]

The problem is that some new Distro versions have bugs and it's better to find out in Virtualbox than
on your system.

Not long ago I couldn't get Mint Cinnamon to install in Virtualbox...waited a few weeks and downloaded it again and installed just fine.

When I installed Zorin 18 in Virtualbox...after a day or two it froze....I once blamed Virtualbox but I know better now.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

The problem is that some new Distro versions have bugs and it's better to find out in Virtualbox than
on your system.

Not long ago I couldn't get Mint Cinnamon to install in Virtualbox...waited a few weeks and downloaded it again and installed just fine.

When I installed Zorin 18 in Virtualbox...after a day or two it froze....I once blamed Virtualbox but I know better now. View attachment 29209

Well, I tried it with multible distributions, such as ChachyOS, KickSecure, Linuxmint and Kali. All of them freeze after some time

 

[osprey]

Well, I tried it with multible distributions, such as ChachyOS, KickSecure, Linuxmint and Kali. All of them freeze after some time

The common elements to the freezing AIUI are the machine, and virtualbox, since the freeze is happening for any distro you try in virtualbox.

One way of testing whether it's an issue with virtualbox is to use another virtual machine.

There's quite a bit of literature on comparing virtualbox to qemu/kvm, the latter actually being the native linux virtual software supported in the kernel. Not having use virtualbox myself, but only qemu/kvm, I can't comment on virtualbox, but what I've read suggests that qemu/kvm is faster, more efficient, has lower latency, is resilient to kernel updates but is also more challenging to set up and configure, isn't so user-friendly and is more complex.

It's also possible to test virtualbox using other virtual machine software apart of from qemu/kvm, but not having used any of it, apart from xen nearly decades ago, I can't say. So my, perhaps unwelcome suggestion would be to meet the challenge of qemu/kvm and trust native linux software. At least, if the same behaviour occurred with different comparable software, then the issue might suggest a full hardware check.

 

[tinfoil-hat]

It just happend again and I was able to SSH into the machine. these were the only errors i saw after reboot:

Edit: here's the textform, still get used to this program

[1970-01-01 01:00:00.750] CRITICAL: gtk_check_menu_item_set_active: assertion 'GTK_IS_CHECK_MENU_ITEM (check_menu_item)' failed
 Received Time: 1970-01-01T01:00:00.750+0100 — over 55 years ago  Format: @%@  Default Zone: none
 Permalink: #msg00000000d69f15b0-v1:d5c8477e4b6a1ee8457c0cf32dc6194a
 Pattern: builtin (8) = ^(?:\*\*\*\s+)?\[(?<timestamp>[\w: \.,+/-]+)\]\s*(\w+):?
 Known message fields for table generic_log:
 | ◆  log_time  = +0,75s
 | ◆  log_level = CRITICAL
 Discovered fields for logline table from message format: : gtk_check_menu_item_set_active: assertion # #
   assertion = GTK_IS_CHECK_MENU_ITEM (check_menu_item)
   col_0 = failed

 

[tinfoil-hat]

I made the mistake to reboot it, after i SSH into it, next time i get the logs, before restart : /

 

[bob466]

It may be your settings...
https://umatechnology.org/ubuntu-freezing-or-not-starting-in-virtualbox/

 

[tinfoil-hat]

I found where the Virtualbox logs are, using grep I found these errors:

Logs/VBox.log:00:00:03.235111 ERROR [COM]: aRC=VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005) aIID={6ac83d89-6ee7-4e33-8ae6-b257b2e81be8} aComponent={ConsoleWrap} aText={The VBoxGuestPropSvc service call failed with the error VERR_HGCM_SERVICE_NOT_FOUND}, preserve=false aResultDetail=-2900
Logs/VBox.log:00:00:03.500684   XSaveErPtr - Save/restore error pointers (FXSAVE/RSTOR) = 0 (1)
Logs/VBox.log:00:15:44.365967 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log:00:15:44.366629 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.1:00:00:02.562494   XSaveErPtr - Save/restore error pointers (FXSAVE/RSTOR) = 0 (1)
Logs/VBox.log.2:00:00:04.205312 ERROR [COM]: aRC=VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005) aIID={6ac83d89-6ee7-4e33-8ae6-b257b2e81be8} aComponent={ConsoleWrap} aText={The VBoxGuestPropSvc service call failed with the error VERR_HGCM_SERVICE_NOT_FOUND}, preserve=false aResultDetail=-2900
Logs/VBox.log.2:00:00:04.491300   XSaveErPtr - Save/restore error pointers (FXSAVE/RSTOR) = 0 (1)
Logs/VBox.log.2:05:23:12.848314 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.2:05:23:12.848908 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.2:07:37:57.257572 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.2:07:37:57.258128 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.2:07:38:06.611517 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.2:07:38:06.612163 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.3:00:00:00.851557 ERROR [COM]: aRC=VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005) aIID={6ac83d89-6ee7-4e33-8ae6-b257b2e81be8} aComponent={ConsoleWrap} aText={The VBoxGuestPropSvc service call failed with the error VERR_HGCM_SERVICE_NOT_FOUND}, preserve=false aResultDetail=-2900
Logs/VBox.log.3:00:00:01.127407   XSaveErPtr - Save/restore error pointers (FXSAVE/RSTOR) = 0 (1)
Logs/VBox.log.3:00:00:39.522257 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.3:00:00:39.522800 QDBus inhibition call error for service org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.InvalidSignature. Unexpected reply signature: got "<empty signature>", expected "u" (uint)
Logs/VBox.log.3:00:02:37.729416 VMMDev: Guest Log: 19:17:24.196534 main     VBoxClient VMSVGA: Error: Service ended with error VERR_NET_CONNECTION_RESET_BY_PEER