Windows 10 guest VM has shared folder hang

[neilc34]

The Issue

On using Visual Studio 2013 on my Windows 10 VM to build a project located on a VirtualBox shared folder, Visual Studio will hang during some file I/O operation such as scanning files for intellisense or compiling the C++ source files. Once it is hanging, I cannot access the shared folder via the Windows file explorer which suggests something has failed in the shared folder file operation(s), and the Visual Studio process cannot be terminated. Indeed, even shutting down the VM hangs on the shutdown screen and I must manually force a VM power off. Interestingly or not, copying the entire project folder from the shared folder to the guest C: drive worked without any issues, and then subsequent build operations from the C: drive work fine without any hanging.

This problem appears to have started happening since version 5.1.x. It was happening after I initially upgraded to 5.1.2 but then seemed to sort itself out, but since upgrading to 5.1.4 it is happening constantly (or maybe I'm just being lucky / unlucky depending on timings).

There doesn't appear to be anything in the VM host syslog related to disk I/O at the time that the VM shared folder access hangs but VM startup does produce the following in the syslog:

Aug 18 11:21:35 centurion kernel: [69073.711857] vboxdrv: ffffffffc0121020 VMMR0.r0
Aug 18 11:21:35 centurion kernel: [69073.783744] vboxdrv: ffffffffc0220020 VBoxDDR0.r0
Aug 18 11:21:35 centurion kernel: [69074.056132] vboxdrv: ffffffffc023f020 VBoxEhciR0.r0

The VM log (attached) doesn't appear to me to have anything in there related to the shared folder hang. Is there any more verbose logging that can be enabled for the VM?

About the VirtualBox setup

I'm running a Windows 10 (64bit) guest on Linux Mint 17.3 (64bit) host running Linux Kernel 3.19.0-32. The Windows 10 VM is run using a raw disk vmdk file which points to an SSD. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are up-to-date with the version of VirtualBox (5.1.4).

[neilc34]

Log file from shared folder hang

[Socratis]

This sounds a lot like #15662. Maybe a duplicate?

[neilc34]

Replying to socratis:

This sounds a lot like #15662. Maybe a duplicate?

Agree, it sounds very similar - I didn't find that issue in my search before posting (perhaps because I was searching on slightly different terms; 'hang' rather than 'freeze'). Both sound like intense I/O may cause the issue.