CentOS 5.6 Freezes possibly due to VirtualBox.
 

My CentOS system freezes completely occasionaly. Display and mouse just freeze. Num Lock light on, then goes out and Caps Lock and Scroll Lock flash. Only solution is to power off and back on.

I was running XP in a VM, and thought that was the issue, but I stopped running it and the system still freezes. Doesn't seem to matter what I am doing at the time.

CPU is an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+ 1GHZ 1024KB cache
1.5GB memory

libvirt is 0.8.2-15.el5_6.4
VirtualBox-4.0 is 4.0.8_71778_rhel5-1
dkms is 2.0.17.5-1.el5.kb

CentOS has just been installed from scratch, and has the latest updates loaded.

Currently I have shutdown libvirtd, libvirt-guests, vboxwebmail-service, vboxdrv, and vboxballoonctrl-service.

So far the system has been quite stable, allowing me to post this.

It was stable for a few hours, then started freezing after about 5 mins for quite a while before I shutdown those services.

John

This sounds like a hardware problem, likely either bad ram or
something overheating. Try running memtest86 for several hours
and see what it discovers. Also check the fans and see if warm
air is being ejected.

memtest ran fine for over 8 hrs
 

Doesnt look like a memory problem. Shutdown a number of services including vbox and libvirt services. Still same problem. Is 28 degrees Celcius too high for a CPU temp? What temperature is being reported by /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/thrm/temperature? Room temp? I think I have seen this at 40C, but currently it is at 21C. Certainly when I saw the 40C is wasn't 40C in the room. All fans are running, cleaned heat sink, fans and filters of dust.

I am guessing probably a mother board problem. What is interesting is that it only started happenning after I installed CentOS. Previously I was running Windows XP. Although there where a couple of strange problems with some game programs I attributed them to the game.
Sometimes I would get a strange noise on the speaker, like an old style bell phone ringing.
The system never just froze before.

Any more suggestions, other than replacing the motherboard of buying a new computer?

Ran memtest for 16 hours, no errors. Only cool air coming from fans.

Well, I have a Laptop now that is experiencing the same problem. It has been a dual boot system for quite some time running XP and CentOS 5.6 just fine. A few days ago I loaded VirtualBox. Now it does the same thing as the desktop I have loaded with the same software. Even exhibits the same behaviour of the CapsLock and NumLock lights flashing after it freezes. I find it hard to believe that both systems would have the same hardware problem, and/or exhibit the same behaviour consistently.

Have upgraded to CentOS 5.7, and Virtual Box 4.1.2. Quite often system locks up when shutting down Windows with the afore mentions lights flashing. Only power off/on fixes.

Solved on the Desktop system.
 

Wiping the system and loading CentOS 6.2, plus loading the latest nvidia driver, recompiling with the following change to nv_reg.h

Changed:

NV_DEFINE_REG_ENTRY(__NV_REQ_AGP_RATE, 15);

NV_DEFINE_REG_ENTRY(__NV_REQ_AGP_RATE, 8);

Other values may work, but I didn't experiment.

Laptop is not using nvidia driver. System has still froze 2-3 times in last few days since wiping and loading CentOS 6.2.