Kernel panic when installing Solaris 10 08/11 x86 on VB 4.1.4

[tony]

When starting a newly created VM from a newly downloaded Solaris dvd ISO image, the kernel throws a panic and the installation process never starts.

I upgraded the Virtual box version to the latest version from

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lenny contrib non-free

The host is Debian Squeeze AMD64. Other OSes install fine in this setup: I have Windows 7, OEL, RedHat, Debian guests installed.

Details:

$ md5sum sol-10-u10-ga2-x86-dvd.iso
bbab88c5cf0e5bd1cce01e0ab22aaab3  sol-10-u10-ga2-x86-dvd.iso

$ dpkg -l virtualbox-4.1
||/ Name                          Version                       Description
+++-=============================-=============================-==========================================================================
ii  virtualbox-4.1                4.1.4-74291~Debian~lenny      Oracle VM VirtualBox

[tony]

screenshot of kernel panic (does not show in the VM log

[tony]

Found a clue to the resolution here: ​http://forum.parallels.com/pda/index.php/t-95288.html comment from Alexander Skwar on Dec 16, 2009, 01:10 PM, which talks about an earlier update of Solaris 10. The allocated memory is too low. I did increase it already from the memory recommended by the VM wizard to 1GB, but this is still too low. When I increase it to 2GB, the installation starts normally.

Apparently it is a new VM wizard configuration issue - increase the recommended memory size for Oracle Solaris to 2GB. I would now like to lower the priority and severity of this bug report, but apparently I can't...

[Ramshankar Venkataraman]

This is a known issue and is more of a Solaris guest issue than a VirtualBox bug, it hangs instead of reporting insufficient memory. Nothing much VirtualBox can do about this except maybe update the defaults VM RAM size for the guest OS. We'll look into this or probably already have.

Thanks for the report.

[Ramshankar Venkataraman]

The VM wizard should now pick 1546 MiB as the default RAM limit for 64-bit S10 U10+ guest-os types. Closing this ticket.