VBoxIntNetSwitch process requires force quit

[aaaaa2]

This is a continuation from ticket #21752 (see it for more details). The VBoxIntNetSwitch process doesn't seem to leak memory anymore but doesn't quit on its own when VirtualBox is quit. One has to go to Activity Monitor and Force Quit the process.

Reproduction Steps:

1. Use two VMs that communicate with each other over the internal network.

2. Shut down both VMs and VirtualBox itself.

3. Observe if the VBoxIntNetSwitch process is open in macOS’ Activity Monitor.

4. Try to Quit the process. If it won’t close, Force Quit the process.

Expected Behavior:

Closing the VMs stops the VBoxIntNetSwitch process.

Actual Behavior:

Closing the VMs does not stop the VBoxIntNetSwitch process, causing it to stay alive. The process has to be Force Quit.

Software Versions and Processor Type:

macOS Monterey 12.7.3

Intel x86 processor

VirtualBox 7.0.14

[aeichner]

This is actually expected, the VBoxIntNetSwitch process runs as an XPC service (because it internally uses the XPC API for the interprocess communication between all the different possible participants in an internal network). macOS manages the lifetime of the service over which we have no influence (except maybe crashing it deliberately when the network goes down but that will cause annoying pop-ups ;) or XPC will just restart the service ). macOS keeps XPC services idling unless there is some resource shortage causing it to recycle those services.