Random Crash when debugging with ddd (and gdb?) on linux guest

[boulderpika]

I am running Windows 8 as my host and Fedora 17 64-bit as my guest OS. I will occasionally see a crash in my guest OS when debugging an in-house application using ddd (and by extension gdb?). Unfortunately, there are no known steps to reproduce this crash, as it seems to happen randomly. The crash always occurs upon the beginning of execution of our application within ddd, but not every execution results in a crash! I can run our application in ddd 5, 10, 20 times or so before the guest OS crashes.

I have recently begun working on VirtualBox, having run Fedora 17 64-bit natively in the recent past. During that time, I did not experience any of these type of OS crashes. Other developers in my environment are also running Fedora 17 64-bit natively and not seeing these types of crashes. This leads me to reasonably believe the error is somewhere in VirtualBox.

A similar issue was reported at https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2528. I have disabled IO APIC in my /boot/grub2/grub.cfg on the guest OS, but this does not seem to have any effect. I have not disabled IO APIC at the VirtualBox level as this prevents me from taking advantage of all 8 cores in my machine. I'll point out that both the issue in ticket 2528 and this ticket deal with 64-bit guest OSes.

[boulderpika]

Just a couple more data points:

(1) Fedora 19, which I just installed to play around with, also exhibits the same type of crash. (2) With Fedora 19, the virtual machine is very stable with IO APIC disabled at the VirtualBox level. It is only with IO APIC enabled and running 8 cores that I see the crash.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please reopen if still relevant with VBox 4.3.2.