Host reboots under load (Intel Atom)

[Toby]

Hi,

I have decided to try and reduce my electricity consumption by using Virtualbox (3.0.10) to run a virtual mail/webserver (minimal traffic, keeping my own personal email and a few sites as a preview space for approval) and firewall on a miniITX Atom based system (using a Jetway JNC92 dual-core motherboard). The host is running Ubuntu Server 9.04 amd64, the webserver guest is running Ubuntu Server 9.04 i386. I have used both IP Cop and Smoothwall Express (3.0-polar-i386) on the guest Firewall. There is 2GB of physical ram in the computer.

The firewall has access to two NICs on the host, one for the internal connection and one for the Ethernet modem. There is also an internal network bridge to allow the firewall to connect to the webserver, effectively creating a DMZ.

Running IP Cop, the host would reboot within a few minutes of initializing a large transfer from the Internet to a computer on the internal network (Through the virtual firewall). With Smoothwall (based on a 2.6 kernel) this issue appeared to be solved - I was able to download ISO images of over a Gigabyte without a problem. However I have recently started to upload the content of some websites which I wish to host onto the webserver (the /srv directory is using a shared folder from the host). And the system is again rebooting occasionally (it's done it twice in the last half hour during the course of transfering just over a gigabyte.

Nothing is shown on the screen (at least that I can see before the BIOS screen comes up) and nothing is written to the syslog of the host. I have kept an eye on the CPU temperature, but don't think that overheating is the issue.

Here is the last snapshot of top on the host before a reboot.

top - 14:07:21 up 1:13, 2 users, load average: 1.83, 1.35, 1.17 Tasks: 98 total, 2 running, 96 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 8.8%us, 25.9%sy, 11.6%ni, 51.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.5%hi, 1.3%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2025184k total, 2010340k used, 14844k free, 7988k buffers Swap: 1951888k total, 0k used, 1951888k free, 1618864k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

2365 tobes 20 0 396m 196m 25m S 117 10.0 28:41.26 VBoxHeadless 2322 tobes 20 0 254m 119m 27m S 77 6.0 28:57.32 VBoxHeadless

15 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:19.37 events/0 48 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.93 kswapd0

[Toby]

Setup of the firewall virtual computer used

[Toby]

Log from firewall virtual comuter.

[Toby]

Setup of virtual webserver

[Toby]

Log from webserver virtual computer

[Toby]

bug is still apparent in both 3.0.12 and 3.1.0, if anything worse.

[Greg]

Using exactly the same hardware, a very similar configuration and experiencing the same issues. Although I'm not quite convinced its related to load. Even a virtually idle guest can cause a reboot of the host within a couple of mins. My current config, hardware identical, software host Ubuntu Lucid, Virtualbox 3.1.8, although I've experienced the same issues on karmic and all Virtualbox since 3.0. The crash seems very abrupt. Nothing to suggest what has gone wrong is written to the host logs, and nothing of interest in VirtualBox logs. Would anybody be able to guide me in how to collect more trace information to diagnose these issues ?

Thanks

Greg