Kernel panic, panic() called by vboxguest in VBoxGuestCommonIOCtl()

[nicmp]

Hello,

One of my Linux guests has paniced yesterday, the attached kernel log excerpt shows the reason.

Would be happy to supply any information which may be needed.

[nicmp]

I should add that I still did not upgrade to 3.2.2 to reduce downtime, but can do so if necessary.

Replying to nicmp:

Hello,

One of my Linux guests has paniced yesterday, the attached kernel log excerpt shows the reason.

Would be happy to supply any information which may be needed.

[Frank Mehnert]

Did you do anything special with that guest, for instance some heavy shared folder usage or something like that?

[nicmp]

I am using the shared folder for log writes, instead of writing them inside the VM image.

I wouldn't call it heavy usage, but its definitely active.

[Frank Mehnert]

#7062 marked as duplicate though #7062 contains a better stack trace.

[Frank Mehnert]

So far I have no idea why this happens. For some reason the guest kernel stack is scrambled. As there were no related changes in VBox 3.2.6 I assume that you will experience such guest Oopses with 3.2.6 too. Do you have any special guest kernel configuration?

[nicmp]

Nothing I would consider special at all. I have the /var/log writing to a shared folder, that's it.

[nicmp]

This problem could also be related to the fact that our VMs only grow and grow in resident memory size, way beyond the specified amount of RAM per VM.

We have a VM which is set to 2GB physical, yet the process uses 3.6GB, at which point we must restart it to prevent the machine from swapping.

All our VMs use shared folders in exactly the same way, logs written to /var/log get written to the shared folder.

[nicmp]

I just attached a more complete trace of a panic which happened just 20 minutes ago.

[Frank Mehnert]

VBox 3.2.6 fixed several potential memory leaks so updating might fix the leak issue. But I doubt think that the memory leak is related to your guest kernel oops.

[Frank Mehnert]

Just to be sure: You updated your guest additions to 3.2.6, right?

[nicmp]

Yes, everything is 3.2.6.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please could you attach the compiled vboxsf.ko module from your guest to this ticket? Thank you.

[nicmp]

Attached, but please note that this is the new one, 3.2.6, compiled just today so it's not likely to match any traces I attached so far.

[nicmp]

Attaching a new trace, which should fit the compiled module I attached a few days ago.

[nicmp]

It'd be probably good to add that my VM panics this way 2-3 times a week.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please reopen if still relevant with VBox 4.0.4.