Virtualbox Crashes on Mac Host When Using OpenGL 3D

[Caleb]

When I use 3D applications with the 3D acceleration turned on, I sometimes get crashes. The VM will freeze for a few seconds, the spinning colored pinwheel will animate, and then the VM will close without displaying the standard Mac OS X application crash dialog. I have attached a log of the VM from a session that crashed.

I was running YSFlight (​http://homepage3.nifty.com/ysflight/aircraftsoft/aircraftsofte.html) on a Windows guest with Intel VT-x enabled with nested paging. I am running this on an early 2008 Macbook with Intel GMA X3100 graphics.

When I run Virtualbox on a Windows Vista host on the same Macbook with a Windows 7 guest with 3D acceleration and YSFlight, I don't experience this problem as often. I have also noted crashes with an Ubuntu Linux 8.04 guest with 3D acceleration in the new Virtualbox 2.2.0 release.

[Caleb]

Log from the crashed session

[Mark Edwards]

I see the same behavior running Ubuntu 9.04 guest from Virtualbox 2.2.2 on OS X 10.5.7. With 3D enabled, the VM eventually starts behaving very oddly (not updating the screen when windows are moved) and then aborts.

Turning off 3D seems to resolve the issue.

[Mark Pitchless]

I get the same problem with Virtualbox 2.2.2 on OS X 10.5.7, running on a MacBook pro (late 2008) Nividia 8600M I believe. Using Ubuntu 9.04 guest with OpenGL and compiz on, get weird graphics glitches - screen doesn't update properly, window borders don't appear, does remove old graphics when moving windows. Also crashes, especially when shutting down.

Seems to work better when running fullscreen, but then leaving full screen confuses the guest window manager which puts windows in odd places (e.g. off screen) and they vanish from the window bar (especially firefox).

[mgs]

The problem persists in 2.2.4 with 2.6.29 Kernel on Mac Pro 8 core Ati 2600HD. I won't reiterate OP's issues because mine are identical. I must say, this is almost certainly different from markpitchless' issue above. I never experience glitches, only great performance and then beach ball into crash. My ext4 partitions hate this.

I've already had to trash corrupted config files filled with garbage after a crash.

[Steve Przybylski]

Seeing very similar crashes to the OP's in VirtualBox 3.0.0 - MacBook Pro, Radeon Mobility x1600, Windows XP SP3 guest. It does not appear to make a difference what OpenGL application I'm trying to run, and I'm not finding any consistent trigger - sometimes, VB will crash immediately after launching an app, sometimes the program will stay up for a few minutes, sometimes the crash is on quitting the app.

[aeichner]

Please reopen if still relevant with a recent VirtualBox release.