serial port problems with VB 6.0.10

[eelstrebor]

I had to set COM1 to raw file to get the windows guests to completely boot. It's like the boot up is in a boot loop if I set COM1 for Host device. Also, I have the second comport set to user defined but it works OK when set for Host device but there are occasional crashes where the guest can't see the comport. I don't have this problem with VB 5.2.x. see attached files

[Socratis]

Related discussion in the forums: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94030

[aeichner]

As I wasn't able to reproduce the issue so far we need some special logs from the serial port emulation. I prepared a testbuild which can be downloaded from here, look for the latest development testbuild (6.1.2+ state). In order to activate the tracing the VM needs some special config which can be added with

VBoxManage setextradata <VM name> "VBoxInternal/PDM/DriverTransformations/SerialTrace/AboveDriver"                         "Host Serial"
VBoxManage setextradata <VM name> "VBoxInternal/PDM/DriverTransformations/SerialTrace/AttachedDriver/Config/TraceFilePath" "<trace/log/file/path>"
VBoxManage setextradata <VM name> "VBoxInternal/PDM/DriverTransformations/SerialTrace/AttachedDriver/Driver"               "IfTrace"

<trace/log/file/path> needs to be substituted with a file path the user as write access to. <VM name> needs to be substituted with the VM name being traced. The current setup doesn't work if you have multiple serial ports configured which are using a host serial port device, so be sure to either disable all but one or leave them disconnected. Depending on the size the resulting logs can either be attached to this defect (they don't contain any data being transfered but only metadata about timings and parameters of certain function calls) or can be sent directly to Alexander (dot) Eichner (at) oracle (dot) com.