Solaris 8 guest crashes in VirtualBox 4.0.2 => fixed in svn

[Rainer Orth]

While I've successfully run a Solaris 8 guest in VirtualBox 3.1.8 up to Solaris 11 Express, it causes memory exhaustion on snv_155.

I now tried to run the same guest in VirtualBox 4.0.2 on snv_157. Unfortunately, the guest crashes now, while a Solaris 9 guest at least boots.

[Rainer Orth]

log file

[sunlover]

This could be the same problem as in ticket #7966.

Try to disable the preview window in the VirtualBox Console.

[Rainer Orth]

Replying to sunlover:

This could be the same problem as in ticket 7966:

​http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/7966

Try to disable the preview window in the VirtualBox Console.

No, this is unrelated: the leak only happens with VirtualBox 3.1.8 on Solaris 11 builds after snv_151a (Solaris 11 Express). The S8 VM crashes just the same without the preview window.

Rainer

[Frank Mehnert]

Duplicate of #7589. It would work also work if you would enable VT-x and nested paging. But we want to fix this bug for non-VT-x CPUs as well.

[Don Beusee]

My ticket, #9445, has been marked dup of this one. As I noted in ticket #9445, setting the VM to VT-x doesn't work because that setting hangs the bootup where it says: Running Configuration Assistant... So I cannot run my VM until this issue is fixed.

[michaln]

Well, Frank did say "if you enable VT-x and nested paging". Presumably your CPU doesn't have nested paging.

At any rate, both problems are fixed in the source tree now.

[Rainer Orth]

Replying to michaln:

Well, Frank did say "if you enable VT-x and nested paging". Presumably your CPU doesn't have nested paging.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for me either: I'm currently running VirtualBox 4.1.14 on Solaris 11 Update 1 (s11u1_12) on a ThinkPad W510 with an 1.6 GHz Core i7-Q720.

When I enable both VT-x and nested paging, booting a Solaris 8 VM hangs at

Running Configuration Assistant...

with the VirtualBox process consuming a whole core. Same if I leave VT-x enabled, but disable nested paging.

A Solaris 9 VM on the other hand boots just fine if VT-x and nested paging are disabled, but as soon as I enable both, I observe the same hang as with the Solaris 8 VM.

At any rate, both problems are fixed in the source tree now.

Any idea when this will be released?

Thanks.

Rainer

[michaln]

Sorry, I wasn't precise enough. To run Solaris 7/8/9 successfully with current VirtualBox releases on an Intel CPU, you need nested paging and unrestricted guest execution support. The Core i7-Q720 has the former but not the latter. Unrestricted execution requires nested paging and VirtualBox always enables if it it's available.

On your system, nested paging actually has no impact on the Solaris boot loader due to the lack of unrestricted execution support in hardware.

[Frank Mehnert]

The fix is part of VirtualBox 4.1.16.

[Rainer Orth]

Just tried it and it works like a charm. Thank you so much.

Rainer