3D acceleration causes Linux guest freezes

[Pablo Sanchez]

Hi,

Checking the forums, there seems to be several people reporting instances of their Windows 11 Guests freezing. I have a situation with Linux Guests. Below are some details in case you need a test case.

I'm experiencing frequent freezes when 3D acceleration is enabled on Linux Guests. There is no issue with a Windows 10 Guest.

The current work-around is to disable 3D acceleration.

I captured a core dump of the frozen Guest using vboxmanage debugvm dumpvmcore. If there is any value, I can upload it to my G Drive. It is 460 MB.

Environment

Guest

I have tried to create a minimal test case using openSUSE MicroOS (immutable O/S).

Below are some of the highlight settings of the Guest. However I suspect VBox.log may only be needed.

• Download latest MicroOS - ​https://get.opensuse.org/microos/#download
• Set up a new Guest VM:
  • Base memory: 3072 MB (4096 crashes)
  • Processor: 1
  • Storage:
    • controller > Use Host I/O Cache
    • 30 GB vdi > Solid-state Drive (assuming you're using an SSD)
      • Current allocation is 8.02 GB
  • Display:
    • Video Memory: 128 MB
    • Graphics controller:
      • VMSVGA
      • Enable 3D Acceleration
• Using the MicroOS ISO, create a new Guest
  • Selected local TZ rather than UTC.
  • Select KDE desktop
• On first boot, the Guest will set up bootstrap apps.
• Use discover to install the Brave browser. Discover is KDE's flatpak manager. By default, it lives in the systray. Its icon is a blue shopping bag. :)
• I did some minor KDE tweaking (e.g. focus-follows-mouse, etc.) If required, I could upload a tar-ball of the test user's $HOME.

Test Case

Using the test case below, the Guest may take upwards of a few hours to freeze. Sometimes it freezes in a few minutes.

I run it in a Virtual Desktop and periodically check.

• Run two instances of Brave
• In each, go to web pages that auto-refresh periodically. For example:
  • ​https://edition.cnn.com
  • ​https://www.theweathernetwork.com/fr/weather/ile-de-france/paris

Host

• openSUSE Tumbleweed - rolling distro
• Regularly kept up to date.
• As of this writing, kernel 6.1.8-1
• Using Prime offloading
  • iGPU - Intel UHD Graphics
  • dGPU - Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q

[Pablo Sanchez]

VBox.log

[Pablo Sanchez]

I don't think it's material but in VBox.log I changed my domain to exmaple.org

[Pablo Sanchez]

On first-boot, I also added the following packages:

• virtualbox-guest-tools
• virtualbox-kmp-default

[Pablo Sanchez]

Correction: I was mistaken, W10 only works with 3D acceleration disabled.

[smartysmart34]

I can confirm this Bug. I am running two Suse Tumbleweed guests (no clones, separately installed with different software packages) on a Tumbleweed Host. As soon as 3dacceleration is enabled, they randomly freeze. Sometimes after a couple of minutes, sometimes after 6 hours. But eventually they freeze. Fun Fact though: I use one instance as a work environment in which I happen to have Video-Calls. The following happened three times by now: During a Video Call the instance froze. The GUI / xsession froze, nothing could be clicked anymore, the instance could not be shut down via ACPI (through the menu). So it seemed as if it froze entirely. But the Audio of the call was still working. So I could hear people talk and they could hear me.

[stalbert]

I'm seeing a *similar* but not exactly the same issue when running a Fedora Rawhide guest on a Fedora 37 host. The difference is that I'm not seeing the guest hang, but the VirtualBoxVM process in the host actually crashes. The crash goes away if I disable 3D acceleration. The stacktrace, interestingly, seems to be all in libvulkan code:

Core was generated by `/usr/lib64/virtualbox/VirtualBoxVM --comment Fedora Rawhide --startvm 003456ee-'.
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x00007fd37de97c04 in lp_setup_end_query ()
   from /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
[Current thread is 1 (Thread 0x7fd37d1ff6c0 (LWP 191251))]
(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007fd37de97c04 in lp_setup_end_query () at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#1  0x00007fd37de85dec in llvmpipe_end_query () at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#2  0x00007fd37dc697cd in lvp_execute_cmd_buffer ()
    at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#3  0x00007fd37dc6b0f5 in lvp_execute_cmds () at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#4  0x00007fd37dc5d406 in lvp_queue_submit () at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#5  0x00007fd37dcead56 in vk_queue_submit_final ()
    at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#6  0x00007fd37dceafd8 in vk_queue_submit_thread_func ()
    at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#7  0x00007fd37dcdcf4b in impl_thrd_routine () at /usr/lib64/libvulkan_lvp.so
#8  0x00007fd3f50f712d in start_thread () at /lib64/libc.so.6
#9  0x00007fd3f5178bc0 in clone3 () at /lib64/libc.so.6