VirtualBox floods my errors.log => Fixed in SVN

[Prikrutil]

Description

Every time my system loads vboxdrv, the following message is written to errors.log:

Jul 22 18:32:02 myhost kernel: vboxdrv: Warning: 2.6.31+ kernel detected. Most likely the hardware performance
Jul 22 18:32:02 myhost kernel: vboxdrv: counter framework which can generate NMIs is active. You have to prevent
Jul 22 18:32:02 myhost kernel: vboxdrv: the usage of hardware performance counters by
Jul 22 18:32:02 myhost kernel: vboxdrv:   echo 2 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_counter_paranoid

My errors.log is full of these messages and I can't do anything with this, because there is no "/proc/sys/kernel/perf_counter_paranoid" file in my system. It's very annoying.

Also I'm not sure that doing "echo 2 > /proc/sys/kernel/perf_counter_paranoid" before loading vboxdrv would make these errors go away. According to ​SUPDrv-linux.c, no matter what /proc/sys/kernel/perf_counter_paranoid file contains, the error will always be logged.

How to fix that

I know that real fix is quite difficult to implement right, ​so we won't see it in 3.2.8

But there are two small fixes which are easy to implement in 3.2.8 and will make those messages much less annoying:

1. Change /proc/sys/kernel/perf_counter_paranoid to /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid in the warning message

2. If /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid already contains 2, there shouldn't be any warnings in errors.log. ​This has been disscused in mailing list

Additional info

Discussion in the forum: ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=33391

OS	Archlinux i686 with kernel 2.6.34.1
VirtualBox	PUEL v3.2.6

[Frank Mehnert]

Well, this is not really log flooding. While I agree that this message should be improved and finally fixed at some time I don't agree this as a major issue.

[Frank Mehnert]

This will be fixed in the next maintenance release.

[Frank Mehnert]

Fixed in VBox 3.2.12.