Oracle hangs on CentOS 6.7

[andrew cooke]

Using both VB 5.0.10 and 5.0.12 oracle XE hangs on startup.

More exactly, on a newly booted client machine

lsnrctl start sqlplus .... as sysdba SQL> startup

hangs at 100% cpu. The stack trace is

[cats@localhost oracle]$ pstack 3435
#0  0x0000000002a6bd20 in ?? ()
#1  0x0000000002a6bc7d in ?? ()
#2  0x0000000002a6bc3d in __PGOSF176_skgvm_detect_xen ()
#3  0x0000000002a6c314 in ?? ()
#4  0x0000000002a6c116 in skgvm_vminfo ()
#5  0x0000000002a6bea9 in skgvm_init ()
#6  0x00000000009234cd in ksmnfy ()
#7  0x000000000208978e in kscnfy ()
#8  0x0000000000928bcf in ksmcsg ()
#9  0x0000000001558127 in ?? ()
#10 0x0000000001557396 in opistr ()
#11 0x000000000155bff1 in opiodr ()
#12 0x0000000008011445 in ttcpip ()
#13 0x000000000154aa72 in opitsk ()
#14 0x000000000154f712 in opiino ()
#15 0x000000000155bff1 in opiodr ()
#16 0x00000000015469c8 in opidrv ()
#17 0x0000000001bbf823 in sou2o ()
#18 0x000000000082da15 in opimai_real ()
#19 0x0000000001bc4cbc in ssthrdmain ()
#20 0x000000000082d981 in main ()

The host OS is Opensuse 42.1 x86_64 (some fairly old AMD CPU).

A colleague on a different machine, with a different host, is not seeing this on VB 5.0.12. It works fine on VB 4.3.34 (and earlier versions, as far as I remember).

[andrew cooke]

bad formatting:

lsnrctl start
sqlplus .... as sysdba
SQL> startup 

[Frank Mehnert]

Could you provide a VBox.log file?

[Frank Mehnert]

Workaround is probably to disable the KVM paravirt provider (set paravirtualization = none in the VM settings).

[andrew cooke]

thanks for replying.

however, embarrassingly, back at work today, i cannot reproduce this. the same VM is now working just fine in both 5.0.10 and 5.0.12.

i have no idea why things should work now. sorry!

(i cannot change the status of this ticket - maybe it should be closed? if i do hit problems i will update).

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks! As you are the only reporter I close this ticket as "works for me". If you experience this problem again, please re-open.

[gasha]

We just experienced very similar problem: Host is Debian Jessie, Supermicro, AMD Opteron 6262 HE. VirtualBox 5.0.24. Trying to create new Oracle DB. Guest OEL 6.7, guest kernel UEK 3.8.x. $ sqlplus> startup nomount

hangs.

Moved VM to similar system, only Intel Xeon CPUs, works.

something tells me that it is related to "skgvm_detect_xen()" and paravirtualization detection.

We are trying to fix that somehow, as we have prepared large AMD based host for data import into VM, and the only other option will be downgrade to VirtualBox 4.1.x (different AMD host).

I will try to upload some logs, if possible.

[gasha]

I was able to reproduce it several times. And yes, workaround is to set paravirtualization = none. We have bunch of 2U Supermicro servers, 11 of them are dual cpu Opterons, most are running Debian Wheezy / VirtualBox 4.1 or 4.3. And large amount of Oracle DB inside VMs. So i'm pretty sure, that this bug occurs only with VirtualBox 5.0.x and AMD processors, and KVM paravirt setting. We are still not upgraded to Jessie and 5.0.x, so hit that only once.