VirtualBox + FreeBSD 9-STABLE == Frozen Ethernet

[Marc G. Fournier]

I'm having an odd issue with FreeBSD that I'm not sure how to trace / where to look … 

I have 6 servers, all identical RAM / CPU / Ethernet / etc … 4 of them are running VirtualBox, 2 are running Jails … one of the 4 I just switched from Jail -> Virtualbox …

When running jail(s), the servers are rock solid … as soon as I switch to VirtualBox (the one I just switched is running one Vbox with a FreeBSD Guest) … nothing else is running on the server … but I will get sporadic freezes of the Ethernet.  One ran 46 days before it froze, then after a reboot, it happened a few hours later, now its been running several hours again without any issues …

The machine itself is not frozen … I can connect via remote console, login, do ps, etc … so its as if the Ethernet (bce device) just went offline.

I was pointed to a wiki about VirtualBox, and my current loader.conf looks like:

===
aio_load="YES"
kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1
accf_http_load="YES"
if_bridge_load="YES"
if_tap_load="YES"
hw.pci.enable_msix=0
vboxdrv_load="YES"
net.graph.maxdata=65536
===

I'm running the latest version of 9-STABLE as well as the latest version of vBox available in ports … the bce device is an older version of Broadcom, so not dealing a new one with new features:

bce0: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B2)>

And as I say, these work great with jail'd environments ALIASed onto them …

The vBox environments are all configured for network using:

--nic1 bridged --bridgeadapter1 bce1

Maybe I'm setting up the network wrong?  But, it does work for awhile … 

I'm not seeing any errors on the console when the ethernet stops working … nothing to indicate an buffer overflowing or something like that … but, again, I can login and run commands, so if there is something I can run to get more useful details … ?