Ubuntu 9.10 host hangs with "task VBoxHeadless:pid blocked for more than 120 seconds"

[Costin Grigoras]

I'm running 11 guests on the same host (dual Xeon X5560). Host is Ubuntu 9.10 server. The VMs are various flavors of Linux ( [RHEL 4, RHEL 5, Ubuntu 9.04] x [32bit, 64bit] ). Single CPU for each guest otherwise they hang with SMP-related kernel messages (see #4433).

Every other day the host hangs hard with the last messages on the console: "task VBoxHeadless:<pid> blocked for more than 120 seconds", for all instances. The uptime seems random, most of the times it's less than 2 days but it was even 6 days once. In the end it crashed just the same though.

It's true that the guests are always busy and the load on the host is at least 4 but sometimes up to 10 because of the VMs but this shouldn't crash the host...

Sorry I cannot attach any logs since the system hangs so badly that even kernel messages are not logged any more.

[Frank Mehnert]

Should be obsolete. Since some versions, VirtualBox uses uncached access to the host file system to improve the performance and to prevent such bad file system interaction.