id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	guest	host
10442	VirtualBox 4.1.12 causes intermittent guest crashes	Hal		"I have 4GB ram on the host and enough swap for 15GB.  I am running CentOS 6.2 host, and normally run 1 PCLinuxOS VM.  Sometimes I run Ubuntu and Mint VMs at the same time.  This worked fine under VB 4.1.10, but under VB 4.1.12 I am getting sporadic and unpredictable guest crashes.

The PCLinuxOS VM crashes most frequently, but I am not sure if that is relevant.  It uses 1.5GB ram and has a considerable amount of ""internal"" swap space.  Again, all of this worked previously.  I have seen Ubuntu and Mint crash a couple of times, with no pattern to which one crashes in what order.

I looked at the host logs to see if I could detect anything of interest.  The host reports oomkill on the victims.  The guest (PCLinuxOS) reports frequent and multiply-repeated errors of the form ""snmpd[2727]: Wrong netlink message type 3"" just before the crashes occur.  Again, maybe relevant, maybe not.  However, I do note that in the release notes to 4.1.12, it mentions that it attempted to fix a socket leak; I am wondering if this might be related.

I disabled 3D in all of the guests I am running and observe no noticeable difference; PCLinuxOS crashed at least once even after disabling 3D.  I use the fullscreen mode most of the time with all the guests.  However, I did play with the other modes a bit yesterday just to see what multiple VMs might look like on the CentOS desktop.  

When I came home tonight, my system was very slow.  I had to shut down Ubuntu, which was allotted 1G ram.  (Ubuntu seems to be a bit of a pig anyway; its unity desktop is reported, by some, to play poorly.)  Now my box is stable and running quite well.  Haven't had a crash since early yesterday morning, a few hours after rebooting the host.

All the guests are running the 4.1.12 guest extensions and modules.  I have all of them set up to use dkms to help ensure compatibility.  I think PCLinuxOS warns me if the guestware is out of sync with the host, but I always manually install and configure the upgrades anyway and reboot the guests to ensure all are sync'd up.

I posted my CentOS host log at http://pastebin.com/1s9G2a3q.  
"	defect	closed	other	VirtualBox 4.1.12	fixed			other	other