Virtualbox 5.2.12 causes massive swapping problems on kernel 4.16 and 4.15

[Matthew Jurgens]

Recently I upgraded from virtualbox 5.2.6 to 5.2.12. From that point on, approximately every 3 days my system would lock up. I discovered that the system was doing huge amounts of swapping and the load average would go so high that the system was non-responsive.

My system has 16GB of RAM and normal load is around 5GB. Most of the rest of the RAM is allocated to cache. When the problem occurred the cache RAM was never released and so my system tried frantically to swap out everything running. Sometimes the OOM killer would be invoked. Once I left the system and it recovered back to normal by itself after about 4 hours. Most of the time I would reboot it using the Magic sys-alt keys as the kernel was still responsive. If I caught the problem early enough I could still use a terminal to run commands. Sometimes I would drop all caches - which worked sometimes but mostly it did not work and the system would still go crazy.

I tried kernel 4.15 and 4.16 which both behaved the same. The problem would always occur between the 3rd and 4th day since the last reboot. I reverted to virtualbox 5.2.6 on kernel 4.16 and now my system has been running for 7 days without issue.

It seems to me that there is something with virtualbox 5.2.12 where it perhaps locks RAM cache spaces and will not free it up (or allow the kernel to) when the system requires memory. I don't even know if that is technically possible, but that's what it looks like

Fedora 27 Host, 16GB RAM, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz.

[Matthew Jurgens]

Normal load averages on this system are around 1. Some busy periods take this to around 8. The above described problem saw load averages of 150+

[Matthew Jurgens]

Also happens on kernel 4.17.3 with Virtualbox 5.2.14

[Matthew Jurgens]

Given that this still happens on kernel 4.17 and that version of virtualbox older than 5.2.12 do not appear to compile on this newer kernel, this bug has become a blocker to upgrading the kernel beyond 4.16.

I now am stuck on kernel 4.16 and virtualbox 5.2.6 until this bug is resolved.

[Matthew Jurgens]

You can close this bug now. I can't explain why I got to a point where I ran for over 7 days without issue (which made me think this problem was virtualbox related). However, the problem started occurring again in the configuration that I thought worked ok. I can no longer point at virtualbox for this problem.

[janitor]

Thanks for the update.