Filesystem corruption when VM with 4 CPU and 8 GB RAM

[Dude]

Hardware: Mac Pro 2009 8-core, 10.6.8/ 64 bit, 24 GB RAM, Apple HW RAID 4 TB. VM: VBox 4.3.16, 4 CPU, 8 GB RAM, SATA and SAS devices. Oracle Linux 6.5 x64

I'm setting up a virtual machine to install Oracle Database 12c. The Database configuration assistant is repeatedly causing some of the following errors:

Read-error on swap-device EXT4-fs (dm-0): previous I/O error to superblock detected Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 0 EXT-fs error (device dm-0) ext4_get_inode_loc comm kworker/u:5: unable to read itable block failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED kernel panic - not syncing

I've been playing all weekend trying several different kernels and settings. I tried 2.6.32, 2.6.39 and 3.8.13, but all produce the same errors. The only thing that seemed to improve was to increase the timeout of the devices, e.g. echo 180 > /sys/block/sda/device/timeout. However, although the errors at the console disappeared, the installation was still corrupt and accessing the command line and typing "ls", for example, would show "bus error".

What corrected the problem in the end was to reduce the VM to 1 CPU and the installation worked fine.

[Dude]

Vbox logs and error screenshots

[Law]

sorry, wrong post

[Frank Mehnert]

First, you are using VBox 4.3.16 which is ancient. I would expect that you upgrade at least to 4.3.38 or better 5.0.24. Second, where do you install the Oracle DB? Is the target located on a shared folder?

[aeichner]

Your host can't cope with the I/O load generated by the guest, there are I/O requests which take over 60 seconds on the host to complete. OS X is known to have a quite bad I/O stack, high I/O pressure will make UI sluggish for example. To workaround it you can try to set the following extradata to limit the amount of I/O requests the guest can generate:

VBoxManage setextradata <VM name> "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/Config/CmdSlotsAvail" <1-32>

Getting the right value will need some experiments to avoid the hangs but without crippling the I/O performance too much.