Crash when VM reboots due to null memory reference

[Adam Reece]

Hello there,

I've noticed lately that when VirtualBox reboots, either via VirtualBox (HOST+R or similar) or instructed by the guest, this fails entirely and crashes with a null memory reference.

• It impacts any guest VM.
• It doesn't impact ACPI shutdown or hard power off, these seem to close gracefully.
• It doesn't particularly matter what stage the guest is at, it'll occur seconds after powering on, or hours after running.
• This impacts running a VM normally and headlessly.

Specifically the error message is "The instruction at 0x00007ffab544f3bc referenced memory at 0x0000000000000000. The memory could not be read."

At this point I can power off the virtual machine and start it up again normally, but I worry if any pending storage writes will have been lost causing corruption. (I did very recently lose a guest due to storage corruption, unsure if this caused it.)

Unfortunately attaching a debugger never seems to succeed, so I'll attach some memory dumps of "VirtualBoxVM.exe" and "VBoxHeadless.exe" when the fatal error message was present.

I did attempt removing and reinstalling VirtualBox, including a whole reboot between, the only change was the memory address of the instruction. I can replicate this incredibly reliably though if further memory dumps are helpful.

[Adam Reece]

VirtualBox log

[Adam Reece]

Memory dumps are available here:

• ​Standard
• ​Headless

[Ilgaz]

Same error, it only happpens on Windows host,not on Linux. The guest OS doesn't matter.