Virtualbox randomly dies, then ceases to open after I do xkill

[Red Squirrel]

At random I'll have a VM randomly die on me, it will just stop responding. Attempts to terminate it via Virtuabox fail. I end up having to resort to xkill to kill both the VM, and virtualbox.

After that, it's no longer possible to reopen it. I tried reinstalling, I think that worked the first time... but this second time it did not work. It's like if the window is opening on a screen that does not exist.

Anyone else get this?

[GreyGeek]

Not since I switched to qemu/kvm.

However, you might not be able to use the kernel KVM. You can check using

egrep -c ‘(svm|vmx)’ /proc/cpuinfo

If you get a '0' (zero) then your CPU doesn't support svm or vvmx.
If you get a value other than zero you can use

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin bridge-utils virt-manager
sudo adduser [B]name[/B] libvirtd  ("name" is whatever your login name is)

to install it. Then, log out and back in and run

virsh -c qemu:///system list

to see if you get an empty list of virtual machines.
If you are using BTRFS or ZFS as your root filesystem then be sure to add the nocow attribute to the folder used to store the VM's BEFORE you create your first VM.

[mr_raider]

Which version of virtualbox? Is it the one in the repos? Or the one downloaded from Oracle?

[jlittle]

egrep -c ‘(svm|vmx)’ /proc/cpuinfo

Note that something changed the ASCII apostrophes to right singe quotation marks, U+2019. Let's see if it does it to these:

egrep -c '(svm|vmx)' /proc/cpuinfo

no, that's ok. The first gave me a match error in zsh, or a syntax error in bash.

[Red Squirrel]

I'm using the one that's default with kubuntu. I can't check version right now as it won't open. I tried that grep command (had to fix quotes) and I get 4. Guessing it's for each CPU core/thread.