Virtual machine crashes on restart of Windows XP when more than 1 core specified.

First noticed in: 4.3.14 Also present in 4.3.15

Behaviour changes depending on whether you are Restarting or Shutting down.

Restarting will cause a screen with a black and yellow horizontal stripe to appear where the oracle boot screen should.

Shutting down will cause the Virtual machine to stop responding when the machine should "power off" requiring End Task.

screenshot of the issue

Vbox Log

Vbox startup log

Disable 3D acceleration and see if the VM still becomes unresponsive.
I can see that the guest OS hangs on reboot/shutdown commands, commands issued from withing the guest. The EMT threads are doing something. But the VM process itself doesn't crash/hang. I can issue a hard reboot/shutdown and the VM continues to run.

Already did all that, i wouldn't have reported it if it wasn't isolated down to the amount of cores by testing all variables.

FWIW, XP64 is not affected, only XP32 SP3, the only thing changed between it working and not working was an upgrade from 4.3.10 to 4.3.14+

Any improvement with VBox 4.3.16?

The two EMT threads are still spinning, eating 100% time of two CPU cores (host kernel time, from what I can see), after issuing a reboot or a shutdown command, from the guest. I have to issue a hard reset/shutdown, to reboot/shutdown the VM.

Afraid i cannot say the same mhanor, 4.3.16 appears to have resolved it.

edit woops

i failed hard there, i forgot to re-enable the second core.

yes, i can confirm that the issue is still present, as mhanor described.

VBOX_LOG=+em.e.l.f.l2.l3.l4.l5.l6

4.3.16 OSE x64

I've attached the last part of the debug log, along with the usual VM log, of the same session.

so its happening on XP x64 for you mhanor?

because i have no issues shutting down my XP64 guest here, only the 32bit XP guest.

I get a similar problem with Win7 32-bit guest and Ubuntu 64bit host. However SHUTDOWN completes successfully, it is only RESTART which hangs. The hang is with strange stripes on the screen, and Machine->Reset succeeds. Happens only when #processors > 1.

Been like this in all recent updates. Currently on 4.3.18

I'll attach screen-shot and VBox.log files. The log file has "HANG HERE" inserted at the point where the hang occurred (the remaining lines were logged after doing a reset)

Screenshot of win7 hung at reboot (yellow & blue stripes)

VBox.log from Win7 32bit host reboot hang (see comment#8)

Should be fixed in VBox 4.3.20.