Re: [VBox-users] VBoxHeadless failing silently, no log data - related to clock skews and grub options?

[Joe Auty]

steve walsh wrote: Joe Auty <j...@...> writes: Hello, Can anybody kindly provide me some general ideas as to what might cause these processes to randomly die all at the same time after having run various VMs for several consecutive hours, and why I'm not getting any log output to /var/log/messages that might help me determine the cause of this problem? These processes just all of a sudden disappear, the only remaining processes are a couple of vboxsvc processes: /usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxSVC --pipe 8 --auto-shutdown This is occurring on CentOS 5.2 kernel 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5, Virtualbox 3.2 (non OSE) installed via virtualbox.org RPM. This may be unrelated, but I'm also getting nasty clock skews which I've been dealing with by running ntpdate every minute. The kernel is being booted with the "notsc divider=10" grub options - these were set a while ago when I was using VMWare Server on this same machine and having the same sort of clock skew problems. Related? Should I remove these grub options? there are a couple of ways (that I know of) to work around the "time skew" issue you're seeing.... 1. you can add many switches (clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic) to the end of your "kernel...." line in your grub list (/boot/grub/menu.lst) 2. use the kernel that has been optimised for vm's to get around this issue (add the repository to your list etc...) see http://people.centos.org/tru/kernel-vm/ I hope this helps. It does! I played with this kernel a long time ago and completely forgot about it, I'll give it a try! After installing the RPM I have the following in my menu.lst file: kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5vm ro root=/dev/NMDisks/root notsc divider=10 The notsc and divider=10 are leftovers from these manually added options I added based on the advice here for CentOS 5.2: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1006427 It looks like this kernel options are no longer necessary with RHEL 5.4 and greater, at least not for VMWare. I'm assuming that the same can be said for Virtualbox? i.e. this is purely a kernel related problem and not specific to the interaction between a particular VM host and kernel? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ VBox-users-community mailing list VBox-users-community@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/vbox-users-community -- Joe Auty, NetMusician NetMusician helps musicians, bands and artists create beautiful, professional, custom designed, career-essential websites that are easy to maintain and to integrate with popular social networks. www.netmusician.org j...@netmusician.org

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ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate 
GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the 
lucky parental unit.  See the prize list and enter to win: 
http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo
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