I was of the impression this wasn’t only happening on my computer, since the bug is mentioned on VirtualBox’s forum and I didn’t create this thread. It’s my first time using a distro with rolling updates, I’m not used to stuff breaking when running on a stable branch.
Please link to the post. I was not aware of any upstream issues as I’m able to use VirtualBox just fine. I track Arch bug reports daily and I do not recall anything reported recently.
No worries. A rolling release distro does take some getting used to. Once you do, you’ll never want to use a point release distro again.
Haven’t had time to read all of this thread,
just posting what I’ve gleaned from the vbox forum.
There are some recent major changes in the kernel that virtualbox hasn’t caught up with.
The changes have been backported to LTS kernels (5.10, 5.15) so the problems happen with those too.
It seems to happen only with certain CPUs, not all.
(I have Xeon E5-2665 and kernel 5.15, and I have the problem,)
Recently people have been trying a new virtualbox 6.1.35 test build with success.
Hope we can get that in Arch/Manjaro soon.
“VirtualBox test builds 6.1.35r151573 (and newer) …”
I have had problems with VBox for the last year. The new versions are somehow unstable.
I also have Virt-Manager (Qemu/KVM) now… Just works. The switch is a pain, the interface of VBox is very good. The shared folder of VBox for Windows guests I still miss now. For Linux guests Virtiofs works really well.
Yes it is.
Have been running Win11 in VBox for half an hour – nice and smooth.
EDIT:
Maybe not; I’ve had some unexpected restarts that I don’t think were Windows’ fault.
Looks like we have to wait for vbox 6.1.35; it’s in testing, and some fedora users report that it works, in this forum.
The VM files don´t get corrupted by anyway (even though running it through those mentioned kernels in those mentioned VirtualBox’s version become VERY unstable regarding memory issues);
Downgrading to virtualBox 6.1.32 or even 6.1.30 didn’t make it for me;
Upgrading my kernel to the 5.15 LTS didn´t make it for me (I was originally on 5.10 LTS);
Upgrading my kernel to the non-LTS 5.18 brought everything back to normal (so far).
Also noticed the issue on a haswell laptop (i7-4750HQ). Virtualbox crashes windows guests, unless kernel 5.18.5 is used.
This seems weird. Problems are generally expected with recent kernels. Conversely in this case VirtualBox seems to have problems with the least recent kernels where patches were backported via the kernel stable branches. These are never expected to cause regressions of this sort.
First I tried upgrading to linux518 and even to linux519, but none of these helped. Then I decided to go downgrading. I downgraded 4 packages from cache like this: # pacman -U file:///linux517-5.17.9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst file:///linux517-headers-5.17.9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst file:///linux517-virtualbox-host-modules-6.1.34-9-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst file:///virtualbox-6.1.34-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
And it worked. My Windows 10 came back to life!
I’ll stick to this workaround until the official fix released.