VirtualBox crashes if 3D acceleration is enabled and host is using 16-bit colour depth

[Zorn]

The VirtualBox application (but not the host Windows 7 operating system) crashes when trying to log into a Debian 7.4 amd64 guest operating system if 3D acceleration is enabled and the host is using 16-bit colour depth graphics. Changing the host to use 32-bit colour depth graphics prevents this occurring.

Obviously I don't think VirtualBox should crash if this is the case, but if it can't be supported easily it would at least be nice if it could give an error/warning instead of just crashing. It was largely a matter of luck that I realised what the problem was. I don't think 16-bit colour support is particularly important - it was an accident the host was configured that way - but if the user doesn't know what is going on, VirtualBox is unusable if 3D acceleration is needed (which it is for most modern Linux desktop distributions).

History of my investigation:

I created a fresh virtual machine with 3D acceleration enabled and installed Debian 7.4 amd64 on it. It crashed after the initial reboot at the end of installation.

I disabled 3D acceleration in the virtual machine and the guest operating system then booted OK. Attempting to resolve the issue with 3D acceleration, I removed the automatically installed guest additions which were part of the Debian install and applied the 4.3.10 guest additions. This made no difference.

The virtual machine always booted successfully to the graphical login prompt, but if 3D acceleration was enabled the VirtualBox application (but not the host as a whole) crashed after attempting to log on to the Debian guest operating system. (I infer there is some kind of graphical mode change at this point, but I don't know.) With 3D acceleration disabled logon succeeded and the guest worked correctly.

I upgraded the graphics driver (this machine is using Intel HD3000 integrated graphics) to see if that would help. It didn't, but as a result of this I happened to notice the host was set to use 16-bit colour depth. Changing this to 32-bit colour depth and restarting VirtualBox allowed the guest to log in successfully with 3D acceleration working. Reverting to 16-bit colour depth and restarting VirtualBox caused the VirtualBox crash on logging in to the guest operating system to reoccur.

[Zorn]

VBox.log after crash

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.