VirtualBox becomes Zombie process, requiring Host hard-reset

[Technologov]

When installing several VMs in parallel, VBox processes may stuck.

Symptoms:

When this happens, all VBox processes becoming zombie processes without ability to get them killed. Windows Task manager did not help -- it refuses to kill VBox processes. I could not soft-restart or soft-shutdown host Windows either. Had to do hard-reset. When I press "kill task" in Task manager, the VM's GUI window disappears from Windows Desktop, but process continues to exist in Task Manager. (which I interpret as zombie process) Host OS & all apps continue to run, but becoming extremely slow, especially on Disk I/O operations.

Host: Windows XP SP2, Intel Core 2 Q6600 CPU, VBox 2.2.2. (VT-x enabled)

It happened with the following combos: (two VMs installed in parallel)

• Win2000 + Win 7 RC1 (32-bit)
• Fedora 9 and 10 (both 32-bit)

I don't see anything strange in VBox logs. But my understanding of them is imperfect.

-Technologov, 18.5.2009.

[Technologov]

VBox logs on Win7, F9, and F10.

[VboxWeb Developer Group]

Logs of VMs when all of them froze.

[VboxWeb Developer Group]

Yeah I've had this problem as well. I was using Windows 7 x64 as a host and it droped out on me when booting Windows 7 (guest) and Windows XP Home (guest) at the same time and I had a session of OpenSuSE Linux 11.1 running.

[Paul]

Windows Vista 32 x-VT, PAE enabled, This also sometimes happens on a VM restart, screen becomes unresponsive and CPU utilization jumps to 100% on VirtualBox.exe. also if "VBoxManage list" or some other operation is run that process will hang. restarting VBoxSVC.exe will stop VBoxManage from hanging but restarting the zombie VM results in a sharing violation.

[Technologov]

I have reproduced this problem on Windows 7 RC1, 64-bit host on same hardware.

Host: Windows 7 RC1, 64-bit, Intel Core 2 Q6600 CPU, VBox 2.2.2. (VT-x enabled)

-Technologov

[Sander Naudts]

Same problem here. host: Windows XP SP3, Guest OS was Windows 2008 SP2 32bit.

Only solution is to reboot the whole host to clear out those zombie processes.

[VboxWeb Developer Group]

I've used VirtualBox on 32 and 64 mode and my experience is that 64 bit experiences this issue quite regularly while 32 bit is intermittent. It also seems to happen most when 2 VMs are running at the same time and usually starts off when 1 of the VMs tries to start and the small startup progress dialog appears but does not move. The VMs that this happens to me on had these things in common: Bridged networking on the same NIC. Same shared folder configuration.

[Frank Mehnert]

Hmm, in vboxwebatsf's log I saw one VM using a bridged connection but I don't see any network configuration in Technologov's log. Is there any other evidence that bridged networking is involved?