Mon, 18 Oct 2010
Ubuntu 10.10 crashes running under VirtualBox 3.2.10.
Keywords: Virtualbox Ubuntu 10.10 crashes timer noapictimer nohz=off highres=off grub
I recently bought myself a new laptop. It's a rather nice HP Envy 14. Unfortunately no linux distribution properly supports it yet and so I run a Ubuntu guest virtual machine on it under VirtualBox with Windows 7 as the host.
Recently the VM started crashing. It would stop accepting keyboard input, and wouldn't shut itself down nicely using the mouse either from within Ubuntu or from VirtualBox. The only solution was to get VirtualBox to poweroff the VM. I upgraded Ubuntu to 10.10 and VirtualBox to 3.2.10, hoping to fix the problem, but it didn't help.
What did help though, was adding the following startup options:
noapictimer nohz=off highres=off
These can be added to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub, then run update-grub and the problem seems to be fixed.
Although sound under a VM isn't really the best idea, I just can't find any music players that I like which run under windows, and so I use Amarok 1.4. (No, I don't like Amarok 2.) Previously I was getting more frequent crashes whilst playing music. With this fix I've not had any crashes, even when playing flac files. Looking at the solution, this makes sense.
