Virtualbox - Various crashes with folding app in Linux

[Jeroen]

I posted a message about this in the Virtualbox forum and it was suggested that I open a ticket via this bug tracker.

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Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to get the folding@home (FAH) SMP client to work through Virtualbox. FAH has a SMP client with a parameter called -bigadv used for running extra large work units. The memory usage is fairly high with this client at around 3.5GB. The problem I have been running into is that when running these extra large units, the client or virtual system will crash within the first few seconds to minutes. The crash is generally one of the following: segfault, page_fault, stack overflow, virtual OS freeze, or the virtual machine itself would crash.

In the case where Virtualbox crashed, I received a notice that a critical error occurred and that it was recommended to close down the virtual machine. I had the options of Ok and Ignore and selected Ok where the virtual machine then closed down. I grabbed a copy of the Virtualbox log. It can be found below. I also have a copy of another log when the virtual machine became unresponsive and I had to manually power down.

Links

Virtual machine crash log:

​http://www.linuxforge.net/fah/VBox.log

Unresponsive system log:

​http://www.linuxforge.net/fah/VBox.log.0

Screenshots of two different crashes:

​http://www.linuxforge.net/fah/fahcrash00.jpg

​http://www.linuxforge.net/fah/fahcrash01.jpg

General Configuration

CPU: Core i7 920 - HT enabled (8 Virtual CPUs)
Memory: 6GB
Host OS: XP x64 SP2
Virtual OS: Slackware64 13.0
Kernel: Tested with a variety of kernels ranging from 2.6.29 - 2.6.32-rc5 and numerous different configurations with the same crash in each case. I also tested with Timer frequencies in the kernel ranging from 100 to 1000 Hz.

Virtualbox 3.0.8 Additions: Installed and loaded

Virtualbox 3.0.8 Configuration

OS Type: Linux 2.6 (64-bit)
Base Memory: 4200 MB (also tested with less than 4GB as suggested via the Virtualbox forum)
Processor(s): 8
VT-x/AMD-V: Enabled
Nested Paging: Enabled (Tried disabled also)

The folding client runs with 8-threads. I am able to get the regular sized units to run stable with 8-threads. Memory usage is around 512MB with these units. The failure only occurs with the extra large units which have much higher memory usage. I have tested the same kernels, OS config, and FAH client in a native Linux configuration and FAH bigadv runs stable there, just not in VM through Virtualbox.

If any other information is required, let me know. Thank you.

[Jeroen]

Virtual machine crash log

[Jeroen]

Unresponsive system log

[Sander van Leeuwen]

The first VM guru is fixed in 3.0.10. This update also contains generic SMP fixes for the 2nd issue you reported.

[Frank Mehnert]

If you still have this problem, could you check if ​this build fixes your problem?