when IO-ACPI is enabled, VM's will cause system-wide (host) freeze

[samopal]

My host is HP ProLiant ML370 G5 E5410 Intel Xeon 2.33GHz/12M 1333, 4 GB HP SA P400/256 RAID SAS, BBWC, DVD-RW 10/100/1000 lan 6x HP HDD 72GB, SAS-I 15K, 2.5' hot plug

I use binaries for SLES 10, 64bit - ​http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.1.6/VirtualBox-4.1-4.1.6_74727_sles10.1-1.x86_64.rpm

Host OS is SLES 10, SP1 and I want to install single guest OS, preferrably windows 7 64bit, for that, I need VT-x enabled, so: 1, I've upgraded BIOS to latest version (2011.05.02, 20 Jul 2011) and enabled "No-Execute Memory Protection" and "Intel® Virtualization Technology" options in BIOS. 2, I did cold restart (plugged out power cord before) 3, I've installed Virtualbox (specific build for SLES10, 64bit) 4, When I enable IO-ACPI option in VM's settings, whole machine will freeze shortly after start, sometimes 5seconds, sometimes 2minutes. It doesn't matter if VT-x is enabled or not, nor if I've assigned 1 or 3 CPU's to the VM, nor the amount of memory, nor if the VM is 32bit or 64bit. It seems like I've tried all the combination, but it all goes down to "IO-ACPI" feature. I enable it, machine freezes (not only gdm, the whole machine, I can't even switch to command line)

I want to use 64bit guest and be able to assign more than 1 cpu core to the VM and without IO-ACPI it's not possible, so I'm stuck here.

I've attached log from my last attempt to start installation of win7, 64b, but from what I see, freeze is random and there is nothing obvious in virtualbox log. I also browsed the linux system logs, but found nothing helpful. System just hangs and needs cold restart.

[Frank Mehnert]

The log is from VirtualBox 4.1.4, are you sure that you really installed VirtualBox 4.1.6?

[samopal]

oh, yes, the log is made with 4.1.4 and the issue appears in 4.1.4, my mistake. Anyhow, I don't see any relevant fix between 4.1.4 and 4.1.6, but I can try to upgrade it and try again. I can post here the result, I expect the same outcome.

[Technologov]

+1 follower.

-Technologov

[samopal]

I've attached the log file from my another attempt to run quest with IO-APIC, this one is from upgraded VBox to 4.1.6, no change, host freezes. I've tried to acquire a VBox core dump, following the instructions on this site, but apparently none was created.

[samopal]

alright, so it's definitely not hardware fault, I've reinstalled host OS on that machine few days ago, now I run virtualbox headless with the same settings and it works perfectly ok. Though I don't think this is a headless vs. non-headless issue, I've tried to run it headless on the old host OS too and it was freezing exactly the same way as it did when ran from gui.

[Technologov]

It means, that you probably had some conflicting software. If you stumble across this problem again, please let us know which software (and drivers) you have installed in Host.

-Technologov

[steveatoracle]

I am experiencing something similar with Oracle Linux 5.5 host and Windows 2008 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit guests. I need to perform one further install without IO APIC to confirm. I will log it under a separate ticket.

[Frank Mehnert]

Please reopen if still relevant with VBox 4.1.22.