Guest restarts unexpectedly with a "Reset initiated by keyboard controller" message in the log file.

[Jean-Christophe Guillain]

Sometimes, when its load and I/O are high, the FreeBSD guest reboots. The only message associated wit this restart is in the VBox.log file :

39:16:41.172608 Reset initiated by keyboard controller
39:16:41.244607 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'RESETTING'.

Host :

• OS : Debian "Squeeze" 6.0.6 amd64
• VB : virtualbox-4.2 - 4.2.6-82870~Debian~squeeze

Guest :

• FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p3 amd64

Attached :

• VBox.log
• vurdbckp1.vbox (the guest conf file)

[Frank Mehnert]

Does this also happen if you decrease the guest RAM to 8GB (if that's possible with your setup)?

[Jean-Christophe Guillain]

Actually, the FreeBSD guest uses a 24.5TB ZFS file system that requires at least 24 GB of RAM to run smoothly... (We use it as a backup server.)

[mvorlov]

I am getting the same error, "Reset initiated by keyboard controller". Host is Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit, guest Windows XP Professional 32 bit. Guest is running with two cores enabled. Virtualbox is 4.2.8, though 4.2.6 had the same problem.

Guest is crashing quite regularly, seemingly on a high network I/O between host and guest and disk I/O on host.

It seems guest is running stable when only one CPU is enabled.

[Frank Mehnert]

But "reset initiated by keyboard controller" normally means that the guest OS triggered the reboot. mvorlov, I would like to see a VBox.log file for such a VM session.

[mvorlov]

Here it is. Crashes were rather frequent when running guest with SATA controller (would crash within an hour or two). Turning on/off host I/O cache seem to make no difference. I tried switching back to IDE. It looks like guest is running longer (about 12 hours) before it crashes.

[Frank Mehnert]

Could the guest reboot just a BSOD which triggered an auto-reboot? Did you disable automatic reboot? See ​here.

[mvorlov]

Frank, With auto reboot disabled VM froze completely (twice) and host is reporting a 100% CPU usage by VM. Does it help?

[Frank Mehnert]

Hmm, but didn't the guest window show a BSOD in that case?

[mvorlov]

No BSOD.I tried changing the networking interface from Bridged to NAT with port forwarding - same result. Switching to a different network adapters and disabling Windows Firewall / ICS didn't work either. Each time I got a frozen VM windows with CPU running at 100%.