Linux guest crashes and shuts down / PulseAudio

[Stéphane Charette]

Host is 64-bit Ubuntu 15.10. Guest is 64-bit Ubuntu 15.10.

I've run into the following error 3 times in the last 3 days. I'll be typing in a text editor in my guest, and the entire guest window will disappear. First two times was using VB 5.0.12, so I upgraded to 5.0.14, but now I just had it happen a few minutes after using VB 5.0.14.

The machine's VBox.log always contains the same text message at the time of the crash:

PulseAudio: Failed to drain stream: Timeout

The first time, this happened after 15 hours of guest uptime. The second time, this happened after 21 hours of guest uptime. This most recent time with VB 5.0.14, it happened after 7 minutes of guest uptime. For example:

00:00:48.819935 Shared clipboard: Initializing X11 clipboard backend
00:00:48.840826 Shared clipboard: Starting shared clipboard thread
00:01:03.841470 VBVA: InfoScreen: [0] @0,0 1920x1031, line 0x1e00, BPP 32, flags 0x1
00:07:08.957803 PulseAudio: Failed to drain stream: Timeout

...and...

00:00:41.948821 Shared clipboard: Initializing X11 clipboard backend
00:00:41.950133 Shared clipboard: Starting shared clipboard thread
00:00:56.487085 VBVA: InfoScreen: [0] @0,0 1920x1031, line 0x1e00, BPP 32, flags 0x1
21:44:45.625730 PulseAudio: Failed to drain stream: Timeout

As far as I know I'm not playing any sounds in the guest. I have the usual Ubuntu desktop, KDevelop, and a terminal window open in the guest. In all 3 cases, I was typing in KDevelop, editing some source code.

[arleslie]

Also having same issue. Host: Fedora 23, Guest: Fedora 21.

Crashed once than again within 10 minutes of uptime.

VBox.log

00:00:37.802194 VBVA: InfoScreen: [0] @0,0 1920x932, line 0x1e00, BPP 32, flags 0x1
00:01:03.758582 AIOMgr: Flush failed with VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER, disabling async flushes
00:05:41.972297 PulseAudio: Failed to drain stream: Timeout

VBox.log.1

185:42:02.345530 GUI: UIMachineView::sltPerformGuestResize: Sending guest size-hint to screen 0 as 1920x932
185:42:02.607970 GUI: UIMachineView::sltPerformGuestResize: Sending guest size-hint to screen 0 as 1920x932
185:47:03.538307 PulseAudio: Failed to drain stream: Timeout

[Stéphane Charette]

Possible workaround:

I changed all my VMs to use the Null Audio Driver in the VM settings. Since doing this, I no longer have had crashes. Nor do I have audio in the guests, but... :)

[pentagonik]

I've made some fix in the hope that we can shed some more light on this issue.

Could you please supply the verbose VBox.log file as shown here: Investigating audio problems

The test build can be downloaded from the Testbuilds page.

Scroll down to the Development Snapshots section and download the build appropriate for your host platform.

Could you please try this and provide the usual VBox log files afterwards then?

This test build is not intended for production use!

Thank you!

[pentagonik]

Any update here?