Reproducable crashes with VNC

[LBurmeister]

At least with VBox 4.1.22_OSEr80657 (with FreeBSD VNC hack) and 4.2.0_OSE (with integrated VNC server) it's possible to crash a VM running Windows XP SP3 when the desktop is viewed via the integrated VNC server: pid 80484 (VBoxHeadless), uid 1002: exited on signal 11. So far I was unable to get a crash dump. The log file is attached but doesn't show anything. The crash is NOT reproduceable when interacting directly with the VM (starting and using it by the qt4 GUI) or when connecting to the Windows integrated RDP server (NOT the VBox RDP server).

To reproduce:

1. Start a Windows XP SP3 VM and install Mozilla Firefox into it. The crash will happen after some websurfing. Good ways to "force" a crash are typing things into the google.com searchbar or heavy scrolling. A very crash prone URL is ​http://superuser.com/questions/84995/how-to-enable-multiple-processors-on-xp-sp-3

2. A more reliable way is to connect by VNC to the VM and log into the Windows RDP server (the remote desktop) while the VNC session is still running. Chances are high that VBox will crash immediately.

[LBurmeister]

Log of a crashed VM

[Chelmite]

This affects me too. I run into this problem when scrolling inside Visio. VirtualBox locks up so that the only thing I can do is trash the current snapshot (losing all my editing work) and reboot the virtual machine. When Virtualbox locks up, it maxes out the host CPU utilization.

VirtualBox 4.2.8 on Ubuntu 12.10 x86_64 host. Windows 7 x64 guest.

This happens almost every day. Can someone please look into it? Thanks.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Note that the VNC support (as a VRDE module) is a 3rd party contribution. Oracle does not support it besides having the source code as part of the VirtualBox tree. So you need to find someone who can find the root cause and contribute a fix.

The generic VRDE code is very well tested (since it's the basis for the VRDP support), so I doubt that this is a problem which affects the generic code.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.