UI Frozen on pause

[Edward Yang]

It's quite annoying. I did 'yum update' in guest Fedora. There was much disk activities while yum was installing updates.

I selected Pause from File menu and the UI froze that turned to a all-white window.

And it seemed the guest os was dead too because I saw no disk activities then.

[Frank Mehnert]

Is there a VBox.log file from such a session available?

[Edward Yang]

Note - I have encountered about 5-8 crashes and frozen condition for the last one year of using VirtualBox.

That's not bad.

But compared to commercial VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC, 5 times is bad - far from commercial quality.

BTW, I had 0 crashes on VMware and less than 3 crashes on VPC, for a period of more than 3 years.

[Frank Mehnert]

Yes, but complaining does not help us identifying the bug. I still don't see the information I requested.

[Edward Yang]

After I aborted the session, restarted and did 'yum update', I want to save the session. But the window froze again, completely unexpected because there was little activities inside the guest os.

[Frank Mehnert]

I still would like to see the VBox.log file.

[Edward Yang]

Get a frozen UI again.

Last line of log: 00:37:27.235 Changing the VM state from 'RUNNING' to 'SUSPENDING'.

[Frank Mehnert]

In that case the guest most likely entered an ACPI sleep state. Disabling the guest power management will fix this issue. You can also prevent this behavior by doing the following:

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME \
  VBoxInternal/Devices/acpi/0/Config/ PowerS1Enabled 0

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME \
  VBoxInternal/Devices/acpi/0/Config/ PowerS4Enabled 0

The was a change in behavior with VBox 4.0.0 which will be reverted in the next maintenance release.

[Frank Mehnert]

The old 3.2.12 behavior should be back with VBox 4.0.4.