Guest fails to boot about 75% of the time

[Stéphane Charette]

VB3.0.0, host and guest are both Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit.

About 75% of the time, when I attempt to boot the guest, the guest's boot process is interrupted before the GNOME desktop comes up. This only started happening once I upgraded to VB 3.0.0. My linux guest then sits at a command-line window, with text such as:

[  137.991145] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 2414097
init: Unable to execute "/sbin/getty" for tty1: Input/output error
init: tty1 main process (1371) terminated with status 255
init: tty1 main process ended, respawning
init: tty1 respawning too fast, stopped

If I click on Machine->Reset, the guest window freezes for about 30 seconds and VirtualBox pops up a window with the following text:

"The IDE async I/O thread remained busy after a reset, usually a host filesystem performance problem. ERROR ID: DevATA_ASYNCBUSY Severity: Warning"

If I power off the guest, then eventually I can get the guest to start correctly. Note that this guest uses ext4 (in case that makes a difference).

[Stéphane Charette]

I did two things to this VM:

• I changed the number of virtual CPUs down from 4 to 1
• I removed the VMWare tools installed in this image by running:
  • sudo vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

(This virtual machine was originally obtained from someone who ran VMWare, not VB.)

Ever since I made those two changes, I've never once seen it hang on bootup.

---

I played around with the number of virtual CPUs to see the effect it had. This DELL physically has an Intel Core2 Quad CPU.

With 1, or 2 virtual CPUs for this guest, everything works fine.

Once I increase the virtual CPUs to 3 or 4, then I immediately get the "end_request: I/O error" messages and hangs on bootup.

[Stéphane Charette]

I spoke too fast. I'm now also seeing it with 2 virtual CPUs. I've gone back to using just 1 virtual CPU to ensure the VM can boot without error.

[Frank Mehnert]

Is this problem solved when you are using VBox 3.0.8?

[Stéphane Charette]

This morning I installed 3.0.8, installed the 3.0.8 guest additions, and again increased the virtual CPUs from 1 to 4. I have not yet seen the hang-on-boot bug, but did notice that bootups of my Ubuntu 9.04 guest are now taking in the range of 5 minutes versus the seconds it used to take.

Looking at the changelog for 3.0.8...which change do you suspect fixed the hang-on-boot error I previously was seeing when SMP was enabled?

[Sander van Leeuwen]

3.0.10 contains guest SMP fixes to address such issues. Reopen if necessary please.