Call for testers: VirtualBox 3.1.4 update

[Mario Lobo]

On Tuesday 20 April 2010 19:27:15 Brandon Gooch wrote:
> 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
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> freebsd-emulation at freebsd.org mailing list
> >>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-emulation
> >>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
> >>> "freebsd-emulation-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >>
> >> 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
> _______________________________________________
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> 

Just complementing Rusty's comments.

As far as I know, this ganged/unganged thing is specific to Phenom processor.

I too am following 8-STABLE/Nvidia BUT I am running the Vbox devel port 
because of the MAC support. I always have to adjust the code because 
VboxGlobal.cpp is checking for Xinerama, which compiles fine but when running 
it doesn't find any Xinerama functions, so I simply take it off the code and 
it runs fine, and I don't use or need Xinerama anyway.

-- 
Mario Lobo
http://www.mallavoodoo.com.br
FreeBSD since version 2.2.8 [not Pro-Audio.... YET!!] (99,7% winfoes FREE)