windows host crashes when memory is full

[gggeek]

I have recently started to get windows BSODs when the guest VMs are trying to allocate too much memory.

I am running Win 8.1 64bit on a laptop with 16GB of RAM, and have 2 VMs open at the same time with 8GB of memory set to each, so there is obviously some over-provisioning going one. This works fine until some heavy-duty operation starts in one of the VMs. What happens then is:

• windows slows down to a crawl - I can see screen and cursor refreshes
• I can briefly see the 'vm has been suspended because of lack of memory' dialog box popping up
• the win BSOD kicks in

This did not happen until recently (version 5.1.8) at the moment, but it might be simply due to the fact that I was not using intensively 2 VMs with memory over-provisioning before.

The windows event log says:

L’ordinateur a redémarré après une vérification d’erreur. La vérification d’erreur était : 0x0000007e (0xffffffffc0000005, 0xfffff8015d657f50, 0xffffd0005c195d78, 0xffffd0005c195580)

The guest OS is dDebian 8.6

Note that the VM additions inside the VMs might not correspond exactly to the version of VBox running.

[gggeek]

info on recent windows crash dumps

[Frank Mehnert]

I would like to see VBox.log files of both running VMs. If VirtualBox runs out of memory it depends on the system what happens. The normal case is that the system will try to free memory memory to make it available for the VirtualBox process. This can take time so it's completely normal if the host system gets slower and slower.

In general it's a bad idea to run 2 VMs with that much memory assigned. Once memory is assigned to the guest it is not freed until the VM process terminates. And the memory is pinned which means that it cannot be swapped out. Having 2 VMs with both 8GB RAM on a 16GB host is simply not the intended use case for VirtualBox.

[gggeek]

vbox log of VM running oom

[gggeek]

vbox log of the 2nd vm

[gggeek]

I added the logs.

While at it, I also upgraded the NVIDIA driver to the latest version available, as it seems that the nvidia driver was the part of the system that actually failed.

To be fair I understand that this is not the use case that VirtualBox was designed for. However it did work at least a couple of times beforehand, in the same oom situation, with the VM getting suspended and a slow but usable computer which allowed me to stop non-essential applications and take appropriate remedial action such as saving opened documents and stopping the 2nd VM...