Bad HD Writes in OEL5.6 => Fixed in SVN

[Paul]

I'm getting regular invalid writes to the disk (reads seem to be OK) when running OEL 5.6 and giving it a large hunk of memory (6144megs) but do not see the problem when giving it 2048megs or less. The error occurs with the "use host I/O cache" option both on and off.

I've written a shell script to reproduce the error and have seen it occur on multiple host machines (although all windows 7 64bit) on virtual box 4.0.4 and 4.0.6, and have run memtest to confirm that it's not bad RAM.

[Paul]

VBox.log from a running machine that had had the write to hd error

[Paul]

A quick shell script that writes a 1meg file from /dev/random and then does a cp then diff 1700 times, and then repeates 100 times.

[Paul]

The issue seems to be within the SATA Controller, when I swap the .vdi over from the SATA controller to the IDE controller the issue goes away.

[Frank Mehnert]

I assume the guest kernel is 64-bit as well?

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks for the testcase, we were able to reproduce this bug. Question is still if this is related to Oracle Linux 5 guests or if the same happens with other guests as well. We will do more tests.

[Frank Mehnert]

We think we found and fixed the bug. Could you install ​this test build and check if your problem is fixed?

[Paul]

That definitely fixed it for me, Thanks a ton!