[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] VirtualBox OSE in Wheezy -- guest additions cause guest to stop (crash?) after a period of time

Mark Fletcher mark at fletcher.net
Sun Mar 20 14:47:05 UTC 2011


Hi

I've been using VirtualBox OSE on a Debian amd64 host for a while. I am
running a 64-bit Windows 7 guest on the host.

A few weeks back I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy, and my virtual
machine was running fine after having done so. I run my host almost
continuously and run the guest on the host for most of the time -- the
host is typically up for weeks at a time between reboots and the guest
is up from Monday to Friday at least and sometimes right through the
week. You will see why that's relevant in a minute.

For a while, I've been hampered by the limitations VirtualBox has if you
don't install the guest additions, and finally got round to trying a
guest additions install. I installed the virtualbox-guest-additions
package using aptitude, started up my guest, mounted the .iso and
installed the 64-bit guest additions. The installation went fine as far
as I can tell. After installing and rebooting the guest, I got full use
of the screen (host has wide-screen monitor and non-guest-additions
guest couldn't use the full width of the screen) and I also quickly fell
in love with seamless windows.

All was going great until I left my machine unattended for a while. When
I came back, the guest had stopped running. And when I restarted it, it
reported that it hadn't shut down normally.

This has happened several times today. At first I thought it was
something to do with leaving the machine idle for long periods, although
I noticed that if my screensaver kicked in and I immediately woke it up,
the guest was still running. The last time it happened, I had turned off
seamless windows and left the guest running while I used Skype on
another Gnome workspace. During my skype call, at some point I did not
notice exactly when, the guest once again stopped running. I restarted
the guest, uninstalled the guest additions and the guest has now been
running for about an hour and a half and is still running, while I
research this issue and write this mail on the host. So uninstalling the
guest additions seems to have solved it.

I would really like to get the guest additions working on this computer.
I have googled around and can find many instances of installing guest
additions causing the guest to fail to boot, which is NOT my problem,
but none of it stopping for no reason I can tell once running.

I am not sure where I should look for logs etc. Is this something I
should file a bug for?

Host: Self-built machine about 2 years old, Intel Core i7 920, 8GB RAM,
1GB video memory, 1.5TB hard disk space, nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
graphics card. OS is Debian wheezy upgraded from squeeze which I
installed from scratch. I am using the nVidia driver 195.36.31 for the
graphics card. guest was working fine, for days / weeks at a stretch
including long periods of idleness, until I installed the guest
additions.
Guest: Windows 7 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 128MB video RAM, 60GB hard disk space.
Very stable if I don't have guest additions installed.

Debian virtualbox packages installed on host: virtualbox-ose,
virtualbox-ose-dkms, virtualbox-ose-qt, virtualbox-guest-additions.

Thanks a lot

Mark




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