running Virtualbox guest dies with warn_alloc_failed

[Harri]

Starting a guest on a Linux desktop machine failed with the attached kernel error messages. AFAICS this is not documented, so I wonder what it is trying to tell me?

The host is a Sandybridge i7 with 16 GByte RAM. There is plenty of RAM available (>8GByte, as reported by free -m).

[Harri]

dmesg output

[Frank Mehnert]

You are running VirtualBox 4.1.26 not 4.1.24, right? Can you reproduce this problem? I also would like to see a VBox.log file of the VM session you ran when this happened.

[Harri]

When I reported the problem it was 4.1.24, but the upgrade to 4.1.26 didn't help. Attached you can find the VBox.log and the corresponding kern.log file.

Its hard to reproduce, though.

[Frank Mehnert]

Do you experience this problem also if you use NAT? And if so, could you also attach the vboxnetflt.ko module when running VBox 4.1.26 to this ticket? Thank you!

[Harri]

Sorry for the delay. Attached you can find the kernel module file.

[Harri]

By now I haven't seen this problem using NAT, but it is hard to reproduce, anyway.

However, I noticed that the file system cache is flushed completely when I start the virtual host. "free" shows that before starting the guest about 8 GByte RAM is used for caching, the other 8 GByte are in use for "real" data and program code. When I start the virtual host the cache goes down to (almost) zero. The virtual host comes up, but _everything_ is horrible slow due to the lost caches. It takes several minutes to fill the caches again.

[Frank Mehnert]

Actually this is a duplicate of #11171. Just disable 'large pages' for you VM.