Custom kernel problems with virtualbox and keyboard freezing

botnet · 08-24-2009, 02:02 PM

I awoke to find the following had been output to a terminal this morning:

Code:

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP                 

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: last sysfs file: /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies                                                                          

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: Stack:

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: Call Trace:

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: Code: 00 00 00 89 d0 c1 f8 08 38 d0 75 04 0f 0b eb fe 48 8b 86 c8 01 00 00 eb 0d 48 8d 42 04 f0 ff 42 04 eb 1c 48 89 c8 48 85 c0 74 12 <48> 39 78 f8 48 8b 08 48 8d 50 e8 0f 18 09 75 e8 eb dc 31 d2 48

Message from syslogd@null at Mon Aug 24 07:26:56 2009 ...
null kernel: CR2: 0000000000007ff8

My keyboard was unresponsive although I could still change VT's via ctrl+alt+F1-7.

Google has not helped yet in diagnosing this output, so I am wondering if anyone here has any experience with this.

Also, the other day I updated my kernel from 2.6.31-rc5 to rc6 (using for the most part my old .config) and now vboxdrv will not start.

dmesg gives the following output in regard to virtualbox

Code:

vboxdrv: Trying to deactivate the NMI watchdog permanently...
vboxdrv: Successfully done.
vboxdrv: Found 2 processor cores.
VBoxDrv: dbg - g_abExecMemory=ffffffffa0143b80
supdrvGipCreate: failed to allocate the GIP page. rc=-8

and again, Google has not yet been of much help in troubleshooting this.

The only reason I am using a custom kernel is for KMS, and I know that is not supported by Slackware, but thought I might ask you gents anyway.

Thanks.

easuter · 08-25-2009, 04:32 AM

Looks like a problem with the kernel module, so this question might be better addressed in the VirtualBox mailing lists or forums.
Please do post back if you find a solution there

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
http://forums.virtualbox.org/

catkin · 08-25-2009, 05:24 AM

Which version of VirtualBox are you using? Version 3.0 introduced several new features including multiple virtual processor cores and these features are not as stable as the last VirtualBox 2.x feature set. You may be able to achieve greater stability by de-configuring multiple processors in the VM, by upgrading to a later release of VirtualBox 3.x, or by installing the last VirtualBox 2.x.

botnet · 08-25-2009, 12:23 PM

Until I get this figured out, I have just booted into the previous 2.6.31-rc5 kernel, and virtualbox-3.0 works fine now. The kernel messages did not appear this morning because in this kernel I do not have the debug parameters set, but the keyboard didn't freeze up either. I am entirely unsure what new options in the newer kernel are causing problems since I did build it with nearly the exact same .config.

The only reason I bothered to upgrade was to address that null pointer vulnerability recently published, but I suppose I can just look around for a patch.

Thanks.