VBoxHeadless crash

[srats]

Hi everyone.

Since our VirtualBox upgrade (5.0.40 -> 5.2.8), we started seeing some VBoxHeadless process disappearing.

Crash file attached.

We'll be glad to help you in any way we can to fix investigate the issue.

[srats]

Crash report is a bit too big for Trac, so here is a Google Drive link to it: ​https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vqDlOl6mBv-Bhjkko7Qn9k-ZsGF0lGAd/view?usp=sharing

[srats]

One of the machine logs.

[Mihai Hanor]

Try to upgrade the guest additions running inside the guest. They're very old, according to the VM log.

[Michael Thayer]

See thread on vbox-dev:

https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/2018-April/014992.html

[Michael Thayer]

Old Guest Additions should not crash a VBoxHeadless process. (Though I do realise that sometimes theory and practice can differ.)

[srats]

As the issue is very hard to reproduce, I do not have any stacktrace yet. I have deployed debug build of VBoxHeadless on some machines, hoping to reproduce it.

In the meantime, I continue investigating the the log I have, and I found the same message appearing pretty much at the same time the VBoxHeadless process crashes. Not sure if it's a cause or a consequence.

Apr 12 15:28:05 <host> kernel: [21282.959309] threaded-ml[2900]: segfault at 1b1 ip 00007fd900a4dd8e sp 00007fd933c82ac0 error 4 in libpulse.so.0.19.0[7fd900a1b000+4e000]

We know we have some issue with audio in our guests since 5.2.

Thanks everyone for the tips, I'll keep you posted.

[Socratis]

Does it work if you launch the VM as "normal"? From the GUI? Normal start?

[srats]

Replying to socratis:

Does it work if you launch the VM as "normal"? From the GUI? Normal start?

Unfortunately, as I cannot reproduce the issue really I can't tell you the behavior of the GUI.

As I suspected, switching the audio backend from PulseAudio to Alsa fixes the issue. I'll continue to use my debug builds on my staging env as much as possible, but I won't spend a lot more time investigate this issue, as my workaround is acceptable for my use case.

We have to rework the audio layer of our guest, so I will give you more data when we start working on this, if the issue is still there.

Thanks everyone.