[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Bug#826252: virtualbox: VM hangs when switching to graphical mode, locking up the VirtualBox GUI for all VMs

[Ross Boylan]

Package: virtualbox
Version: 4.3.36-dfsg-1+deb8u1~bpo70+1
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-CC: RossBoylan at stanfordalumni.org

Dear Maintainer,
Thank you for making VirtualBox available for Debian.

   * What led up to the situation?
My host and guest are both running Debian. After some recent updates (on both
host and guest) I restarted the guest. The guest came up in text mode (as
always); I logged onto an account and executed startx. The screen resized, as
expected, but after that was unresponsive--right click did nothing. Initially
the VM controls still worked; I was able to stop and resume mouse integration.
Eventually I tried the VirtualBox GUI and found it was completely unresponsive.
VBoxManage returned some basic info about the vm, but poweroff displayed a
progress indicator that stopped at 20% and hung there.

This scenario had been working fine for months.  That is, after starting up
graphics I could right-click and launch an app.  And the main VirtualBox GUI
remained responsive.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
I restarted the host system and tried again. The results were the same.

Eventually I discovered that if I killed the process running the VM the
VirtualBox GUI became responsive again, showing the VM as aborted.  I also did
/etc/init.d/virtualbox stop and start, but that was insufficient--the result of
the stop was
# /etc/init.d/virtualbox stop
Stopping VirtualBox kernel modulesCannot unload module vboxnetflt ... failed!
 failed!

My only work-around is to avoid going into graphical mode in the VM.

     * Additional notes
The host is still on Debian 7.10, though I am using a backported VirtualBox and
backported (by me) nvidia drivers (only thing that works with my resolution
monitor).  Because of the nvidia drivers I'm on a backported kernel.
The guest is running Debian 8.4 with virtualbox guest additions.  Both are 64
bit.  The guest mostly runs mythtv.

Although the recent updates (imagemagick) don't seem likely to cause these
problems, both the host and guest had been up for ~ 1 month.  So some changes
during that period may have caught up with me when the VM restarted. But AFAIK
the system was basically constant during this  period.

I don't see anything that looks error-like or suspicious in the logs on the
guest or the host, either the VirtualBox specific logs (attached from one of
the recent unresponsive sessions--it seemed to hang just before the last line.
It's interesting that there was a shutdown entry after that) or the system logs
(system.log, kern.log, daemon.log, Xorg.0.log).  However, because the guest
shutdown was abrupt some files written during the "crash" may have been lost
when the journal was replayed for the virtual disks on restart.

The last entries in the VirtualBox log for the VM are
00:02:05.950350 Starting host clipboard service
00:02:05.950377 Initializing X11 clipboard backend
00:02:05.994879 Shared clipboard: starting shared clipboard thread



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.10
  APT prefers oldstable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable-updates'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages virtualbox depends on:
ii  adduser          3.113+nmu3
ii  libc6            2.13-38+deb7u11
ii  libcurl3-gnutls  7.26.0-1+wheezy13
ii  libgcc1          1:4.7.2-5
ii  libgsoap4        2.8.16-2~bpo70+1
ii  libpng12-0       1.2.49-1+deb7u2
ii  libpython2.7     2.7.3-6+deb7u2
ii  libsdl1.2debian  1.2.15-5
ii  libssl1.0.0      1.0.1e-2+deb7u21
ii  libstdc++6       4.7.2-5
ii  libvncserver0    0.9.9+dfsg-1+deb7u1
ii  libvpx1          1.1.0-1
ii  libx11-6         2:1.5.0-1+deb7u2
ii  libxcursor1      1:1.1.13-1+deb7u1
ii  libxext6         2:1.3.1-2+deb7u1
ii  libxml2          2.8.0+dfsg1-7+wheezy5
ii  libxmu6          2:1.1.1-1
ii  libxt6           1:1.1.3-1+deb7u1
ii  python           2.7.3-4+deb7u1
ii  python2.7        2.7.3-6+deb7u2
ii  virtualbox-dkms  4.3.36-dfsg-1+deb8u1~bpo70+1
ii  zlib1g           1:1.2.7.dfsg-13

Versions of packages virtualbox recommends:
ii  libgl1-mesa-glx [libgl1]  8.0.5-4+deb7u2
ii  libqt4-opengl             4:4.8.2+dfsg-11
ii  libqtcore4                4:4.8.2+dfsg-11
ii  libqtgui4                 4:4.8.2+dfsg-11
ii  virtualbox-qt             4.3.36-dfsg-1+deb8u1~bpo70+1

Versions of packages virtualbox suggests:
ii  vde2                            2.3.2-4
ii  virtualbox-guest-additions-iso  4.3.18-1~bpo70+1

-- no debconf information
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