# VirtualBox choking my laptop to death

## DToNAToR

Sometimes, not always, VirtualBox makes my laptop freeze. The hard-drive activity led (on the laptop) is lit and the system is barely responding,

not even mouse or keyboard.

If I wait for few minutes, then I can see the VM getting killed and the system becomes responsive again.

My machine has 4G of RAM and swap turned off. The VM itself has 1G of ram assigned to it.

Here's a complete (boot to error) dmesg:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/904989/dmesg_log.txt

Thanks for any help.

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## DaggyStyle

 *DToNAToR wrote:*   

> Sometimes, not always, VirtualBox makes my laptop freeze. The hard-drive activity led (on the laptop) is lit and the system is barely responding,
> 
> not even mouse or keyboard.
> 
> If I wait for few minutes, then I can see the VM getting killed and the system becomes responsive again.
> ...

 

turn swap on.

what cpu do you have?

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## DToNAToR

As I can't reproduce this behavior every time, I would like to hear how that might help please.

CPU info:

http://pastebin.com/TaQDCVXg

And my kernel configuration, if that would help:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/904989/kernel-config-3.2.12-gentoo

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## EatMeerkats

 *DToNAToR wrote:*   

> As I can't reproduce this behavior every time, I would like to hear how that might help please.

 

The out of memory killer is killing VirtualBox because, well, you're out of memory.

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## DToNAToR

So this behavior (mouse not responding) is normal for a state where OOM needs to kick in?

(meanwhile I turned swap on as you suggested)

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## mbar

Same here. After few weeks of trying to solve the problem (switching kernels, switching gcc versions, mind that I use safe CFLAGS), I switched to virtualbox-bin and never looked back.

Compiled virtualbox was getting OOM kill after some time even when the VM was only sitting idle.

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