Ignored session becomes unresponsive white window

[Jon Aimone]

Preliminaries: Vbox 3.2.12 on Vista64 host, Solaris 11 Express build 151a + Guest Additions, HP w/AMD quad processor, 8GB RAM.

Once again I've encountered a white screen of silence on my Solaris 11 Express guest. The attached files are the VBox.log, Solaris 11 messages, a screen capture of the Vista64 Task Manager showing the VirtualBox process hogging one of my four processors, and (just for grins) a screen capture of part of the white screen of silence...

I also have an SSH session into the guest, which is not hung as previously thought and not busy at all. Although Vista64 shows the VirtualBox process consuming an entire processor, Solaris in the guest is idle.

Wreckdangle:/export/home/aimone [root] (774)> prstat -c -n 5 1 3 Please wait...

PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP

2891 aimone 365M 96M sleep 59 0 0:07:23 1.2% firefox-bin/9

5 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 0:06:43 0.2% zpool-rpool/136

1125 aimone 379M 228M sleep 59 0 1:00:51 0.2% Xorg/1 1323 aimone 159M 19M sleep 59 0 0:10:02 0.2% gnome-netstatus/2 3093 aimone 225M 114M sleep 49 0 0:00:43 0.2% acroread/2

Total: 111 processes, 639 lwps, load averages: 0.06, 0.06, 0.06

PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP

2891 aimone 365M 96M sleep 59 0 0:07:23 1.2% firefox-bin/9

5 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 0:06:43 0.2% zpool-rpool/136

1125 aimone 379M 228M sleep 59 0 1:00:51 0.2% Xorg/1 3373 root 9820K 3204K cpu0 59 0 0:00:00 0.2% prstat/1 1323 aimone 159M 19M sleep 59 0 0:10:02 0.2% gnome-netstatus/2

Total: 111 processes, 639 lwps, load averages: 0.06, 0.06, 0.06

PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP

2333 aimone 498M 241M sleep 32 0 0:54:11 1.4% thunderbird-bin/25 2891 aimone 365M 96M sleep 59 0 0:07:23 1.2% firefox-bin/9

5 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 0:06:43 0.2% zpool-rpool/136

3373 root 9820K 3204K cpu0 59 0 0:00:00 0.2% prstat/1 1125 aimone 379M 228M sleep 59 0 1:00:51 0.2% Xorg/1

Total: 111 processes, 639 lwps, load averages: 0.06, 0.06, 0.06

Wreckdangle:/export/home/aimone [root] (775)>

If this were a /normal/ Xorg issue as I've seen in the past, then killing Xorg would have recovered the display. In this case killing Xorg does show some activity, the guest window changes size indicating what would normally be a reversion to a text console while Xorg is restarted, but actually this completely hangs the guest. The SSH session hangs implying that the guest itself is now hung.

What other things can I do to help debug this problem? It has persisted across the last three VBox updates and several Solaris builds.

[Jon Aimone]

Solaris console messages

[Jon Aimone]

Vista64 Task Manager showing VirtualBox hogging a processor

[Jon Aimone]

Infamous white screen of silence