I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 as a VirtualPC 2007 virtual machine and I have been having some stability issues that I've so far been unable to resolve. An important note is that all the problems I'm having appear on some hardware but not others. On the troublesome machine I have checked the physical disk and memory, and I have run mprime overnight in the virtual machine, all without any trouble. I believe this more or less rules out hardware or memory/cpu virtualization problems, but if anyone has a better test in mind, I'd like to hear it.
The specific problem I am seeing is, as best I can tell, related to processes starting, and potentially the way the terminal is used. The machine will boot and run fine, sometimes for hours, sometimes for minutes, and then the following symptoms start to appear (all taking place from a vterm, X isn't running). Once these symptoms appear it's pretty much game over and the virtual machine has to be forcibly reset. It seems that starting a terminal-intensive (graphically speaking) program such as vim, top, screen can trigger a cascade effect where the newly started program hangs before printing anything to the terminal. It cannot be killed with ^C or backgrounded with ^Z. From this point on, most programs (for example, ps, ping, strace) simply cannot start, though other "small" programs such as cat, ls, tail, ifconfig etc can usually run. You can switch vterms with ALT+F# and enter in a username and password, but you cannot actually log in (it just hangs forever). Apache will usually keep serving pages, but server-side programs (PHP and CGI) will not run. You cannot login via SSH. I've played around quite a bit trying to find any clues as to what might be causing the problems. There appears to be nothing in the log files (dmesg, messages, syslog, auth) that indicate any kind of obvious problem. I've been reading about some potential problems that VirtualPC 2007 has hosting linux guests, and though I haven't seen any of these manifest the systems that do not exhibit the previously described issue, I have tried some of the "solutions" presented online. These usually include adding some semi-random combination of kernel options such as noapic, nolapic, noreplace-paravirt, and noapm. None of these seem to have any impact on this problem. I have also made sure it isn't related to power management settings on the host computer, all power saving modes (standby, hibernate, etc) are disabled. I have also tried disabling APM on the linux guest, but without effect. I realize that there are a lot of factors involved with this, but I would love to hear any ideas you might have to troubleshoot or try and find the cause of these issues. Since the VM is supposedly hardware-agnostic, I wouldn't expect the hardware differences between the machines that host the VM without trouble (a desktop and another laptop) and this laptop that is having problems to be the cause. As I said, this is Ubuntu 9.04 with all updates installed, so the kernel is "linux 2.6.28-13-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 30 19:49:51 UTC 2009 i686". The host operating system is Windows XP running VirtualPC 2007 SP1 (I know, boo and hiss, but this is what I am to work with). Thanks for reading this (really) long message and if you have any tips or ideas or want more info, let me know. Any help is appreciated! Nick -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
