Solaris guest appears to hang for minutes after keyboard bell

[Frank Batschulat (Oracle)]

There is an apparent misbehavior I noticed when running Solaris 11.4 and Solaris Trunk guest VMs, it appears to hang/freeze for a couple of minutes when you get the Gnome terminal to issue a keyboard bell, eg. when you delete more characters in the command line using the backspace key as there are. Then the keyboard bell rings and then the guests Gnome desktop appaers to be frozen for a couple of minutes and then returns back to normal. This is very simple and quick to reproduce.

Solaris 11.4 latest SRU
fail:
Host Driver: PulseAudio
Controller: ICH AC97

Solaris 11.4.0.15.0 aka 11.4 FCS
fail:
Host Driver: OSS Audio Driver
Controller: ICH AC97

Solaris Trunk 11.5.0.65.0
fail:
Host Driver: PulseAudio
Controller: ICH AC97

WORKAROUND:

Disable the audio device in the VM settings.

It sounds like some problem with audio, but I don't know if anyone runs Solaris on real hardware that has audio and can verify if that happens as well on bare metal using Gnome.

This happen regardless whether or not one uses the Gnome terminal or just a simple Xterm. Same result.

That might be a bug in our audio emulation or in Solaris.

And when it is hung serial console access works fine so it is just Gnome that is stuck/frozen for a couple of minutes.

The problem does not show up with Solaris 10 or OpenIndiana based guest VMs running their corresponding Gnome desktops.

[paulson]

This does not appear to occur on Solaris bare metal systems.

As another data point, this has been seen with VirtualBox 6.0.16 as well as with the latest 6.1.x development builds and is independent of the host OS.

[bricowan]

Yes, I am currently finding this INCREDIBLY annoying on 6.1.18. I have to use Solars x86 VB VM's to reproduce issues, and a misplaced tab or backspace in a local terminal renders the guest unusable for 60+ seconds.

[bricowan]

Disabling the audio device makes the problem "better" in that I don't get a 60+ second hang, intead a 3-4 second one...