How to troubleshoot why VirtualBox kernel module freezes the system?

[Marius Nünnerich]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 22:18, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:
> VirtualBox kernel module (port emulators/virtualbox-ose-kmod) began to cause
> system freezes from some kernel change around the end of January.
> Once the system freezes it has to be rebooted. Soundcard, if it was playing
> something, begins to cycle some very short piece.
> Nothing is logged into /var/log/messages.
>
> Is there any way to troubleshoot this, like enabling some kernel
> configuation options?
> What is normally done in such case?
> Should I run system under kernel debugger? But would it detect something if
> it's not a SEGV but the freeze?

It freezes for me too after a short while when I use the nvidia blob
(8.0-RELEASE/amd64). Does your machine have firewire and do you have a
second machine with firewire? I heard that it should be possible to
read the ram contents of a frozen machine over firewire. I only have
one firewire machine so I can't test.