SATA AHCI broken in windows XP in 4.0.6

[cschmidt]

After upgrading from VirtualBox 4.0.4 to 4.0.6 a Windows XP VM is unable to access a secondary drive (pops up the error message "S:\ is not accessible The Semaphore timeout period has expired"). The SATA driver used is Intel 82801HEM/HBM version 7.0.0.1020 from 12.0.2.2007.

A second disk seems to be affected worse than the primary, since I didn't encounter the Semaphore timeouts on C:, just on the second drive. However, accessing the c: drive also has latencies of minutes when e.g. starting a cmd window.

[cschmidt]

Logfile for the problematic VM

[Frank Mehnert]

Are you 100% sure that this bug is related to upgrading from VBox 4.0.4 to VBox 4.0.6? I can't see any changes in the AHCI emulation which would explain this behavior.

[cschmidt]

Yes, after downgrading back to 4.0.4 the timeouts were gone. At the same time, there were no noticeable performance issues with linux guests using AHCI. Just that Windows XP.

[Frank Mehnert]

Replying to cschmidt:

Yes, after downgrading back to 4.0.4 the timeouts were gone. At the same time, there were no noticeable performance issues with linux guests using AHCI. Just that Windows XP.

Would you mind trying again with VBox 4.0.6 to rule out any coincidence?

[cschmidt]

I'm sorry, I completely migrated away from virtualbox. I encountered a severe memory leak in this VM as well (700-800MB/day) which caused a kernel panic on the host once the VM hit 4GB, or every 2-3 days. This was completely impossible to sustain in a production environment.

[Frank Mehnert]

Already tried to reproduce this memory leak (copying files on shared folders, right?) but without success. Without a testcase we can't do much. Actually 4.0.6 fixed a memory leak.