Warn people about memory corruption in VMs due to Intel Power Gadget run on host macOS

[janvenekamp]

When running Intel Power Gadget (IPG) on a macOS host alongside VirtualBox it can cause memory corruption in the VirtualBox guests, causing al kinds of random errors, data corruption and eventually kernel panics in the guests.

However, the memory corruption can stay hidden for a while because it will not always directly lead to observable errors. And because IPG seems like an innocent monitoring tool, many people will be oblivious to this corruption due to IPG.

Some other reports about this: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=97929 ​https://stanislas.blog/2020/02/crashes-virtualbox-macos-intel-power-gadget/

Because of the severity of the problem and the fact that it is far from apparent that this is caused by IPG, I think it is wise to warn people about this.

Maybe just add some text on the download page, or maybe even better add a warning in VirtualBox if it detects com.intel.driver.EnergyDriver is loaded.

[Next-Door Tech]

Another forum post regarding incompatibility with IPG: ​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=97482

Important to note is that many users who installed IPG likely did so as a part of the quite popular iStat Menus system monitoring suite. It's not included by default but it is an optional install to enable the CPU boost clock monitoring feature. Just identifying a likely culprit for many users.

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As an aside, and while I have no solid proof to support this, I believe this issue affects many more macOS host users than appears at first glance. The macOS host subforum seems to be full of posts with mysterious guest crash issues that go unresolved. The commonly repeated wisdom seems to be that users need to uninstall/reinstall and make sure their kexts are loaded properly. While I'm sure that solves many users' issues, I just have a hunch that IPG is the unknown culprit for many cases where a reinstall doesn't help.

[Next-Door Tech]

It seems that the developer for Intel Power Gadget on macOS is aware of this issue as evidenced by this Intel forum post:
​https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/macOS-INTEL-POWER-GADGET-Request/m-p/1197293#M88666

He claims the issue is with a VirtualBox Driver, I'm going to DM him there and refer him to this issue ticket to see if he has anything more specific to contribute.