Many repeated short lockups of guest while performing disk i/o

[Sam Morris]

I've been using VirtualBox 4.1.6 with Linux 3.1 and guest additions 4.1.4 in my VM for a few days without incident. However since upgrading the guest additions of my VM to 4.1.6 this morning, I've seen many temporary lockups when disk i/o is being performed. These last from a dew seconds to maybe a dozen or more.

They appear to be similar to those desribed in bug #8085, but I'm not 100% sure that this is a duplicate, since the log messages are different (something actually appears in the VirtualBox log this time!)

Guest settings:

• Chipset: PIIX3
• IO/APIC enabled
• Processors: 4
• PAE/NX enabled
• VT-x enabled
• Nested paging enabled
• Storage: AHCI SATA controller with host i/o cache disabled

[Sam Morris]

linux kernel log messages

[Sam Morris]

virtualbox log

[Frank Mehnert]

The VBox.log file shows many jobs which were finished after a long time (more than 20 seconds). Your host drive D:, is that too slow, does it have some disk errors? Is there any notable I/O load running in parallel to the VirtualBox VM?

[Sam Morris]

I don't think it's the disk--I've always used the same disk with VirtualBox without incident until now, and there's nothing in the Windows event log. I don't think there was any other significant I/O going on, at least that I initiated myself, but it's always possible Windows was doing something mysterious. I had booted the host up shortly before starting the VM, but I think it had quiesced before the guest started exhibiting this behaviour.

[Sam Morris]

I've not seen this for ages, feel free to close.

[Frank Mehnert]

Thank your for the information!