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

[Mark Fletcher]

Has anyone had a chance to look into this?

On Sun, 2011-03-20 at 23:47 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> 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