Call for testers: VirtualBox 3.1.4 update

[Brandon Gooch]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 6:32 PM, Rusty Nejdl <rnejdl at ringofsaturn.com> wrote:
>
>>>
>>> Bernard,
>>>
>>> I tested today with the latest NVIDIA for x64 and it ran for a couple
> of
>>> hours without a freeze.  But, it still froze.   I'm running 4 VM's now
>>> for
>>> a couple of hours with NV driver without issue.  It sounds like I need
>>> to
>>> report this up to Zander with Nvidia unless you have any other
>>> suggestions.
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Rusty Nejdl
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>>>
>>
>> Hey man, would it be possible for you to enable debugging options on
>> your machine, start your VMs running, then switch to ttyv0, and let it
>> run for while? This is the only way I can get a clean crash dump and
>> generate any data -- I've never been able to "cleanly" crash my system
>> running Xorg (it usually freezes).
>>
>> FYI, I'm running multiple VMs (Windows XP, 7), and I've experienced
>> "freezes" running multiple VMs since using VirtualBox (which despite
>> the lockups, I'm SOOOOO thankful to have on FreeBSD -- thanks again to
>> all the VBox devs!!!!)...
>>
>> -Brandon
>
> Brandon,
>
> Mario Lobo and I have been working on this in the background and we found
> that multiple cpu support in Virtualbox appears broken.  Any VM with more
> than 1 CPU will freeze.
>

Interesting, however: each of my virtual machines only has 1 cpu...

> Mario was also able to find that using unganged memory also confuses
> Virtualbox.  He enabled that in his motherboard and Virtualbox became more
> stable.

I'll have to check this out on the Dell 755 with 8 GBs of RAM I'm
running. Though, I don't recall seeing a setting for this in the BIOS.

> I have been able to run 6 VM's at the same time, with compositing enabled,
> and 3D acceleration in the VM as well, all with 1 CPU per VM only.

That's great! Are you getting 3D acceleration in Windows? How?

Actually, I've had ZERO lockups since I started following 8-STABLE
(updating weekly), using the latest 64-bit NVIDIA drivers, and
installing the most recent VirtualBox port (3.1.6_3 from
emulation/virtualbox-ose, emulation/virtualbox-ose-kmod).

Thanks for the information and suggestions!

-Brandon