VirtualBox problems

English Applications
#1

I installed the VirtualBox RPM after a few problems. Then it wouldn’t start with no error messages, so I put the vboxusers group in my user. It still won’t start unless I start as root, is that right?

It seems if it needed root it would ask for a password. What else do I need to do to get it to work?

#2

You may need to do, from a su terminal

/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

then

modprobe vboxdrv

#3

No, not right, as it should start from your normal user (as a member of vboxusers).

I and others had a similar problem, but with error message. See this previous thread for a possible solution.

Hope that helps:).

#4

Thanks, I will see if that works.

Now I have a more pressing issue. VirtualBox doesn’t seem to be releasing the memory after I kill it.

Normally I have 700-900 MB of RAM used, I set up the XP VM to use 1024. When I start it up it goes up to 2400 MB or so, and then a few minutes later it is at 3800 MB. I shut down the VM and exit VB and it drops back to 2400.

In the process table, with all processes showing it adds to to about 1GB, but yet it says 2.4 GB is used.

#5

OK. XP does not use memory like Linux. You will probably find that the memory is free in cache. Run a terminal and type:

top

post result here.

Ditto to @consused, I should have said it too. Don’t run as root.

#6 
top - 20:46:10 up  2:16,  3 users,  load average: 1.07, 0.52, 0.34
Tasks: 126 total,   2 running, 124 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  3.0%us, 42.9%sy,  0.0%ni, 39.2%id, 13.6%wa,  0.2%hi,  1.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   4092244k total,  3969684k used,   122560k free,    21284k buffers
Swap:  2104472k total,      120k used,  2104352k free,  2578008k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 4681 david     20   0 1146m 1.1g  26m S   90 27.1  31:05.58 VirtualBox
 1585 root      15  -5     0    0    0 D    1  0.0   0:03.00 kjournald
 2335 root      20   0  378m  41m  14m S    0  1.0   0:50.70 Xorg
    1 root      20   0  1008  360  312 S    0  0.0   0:00.88 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.30 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.14 ksoftirqd/1
    7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.22 events/0
    8 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.18 events/1
    9 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
   10 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
   11 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kintegrityd/1
   12 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.04 kblockd/0
   13 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kblockd/1
   14 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid

I fixed the root issue, thank you for the links.

#7

I take it this is with VBox running??

4681 david     20   0 1146m 1.1g  26m S   90%cpu 27.1mem  31:05.58 VirtualBox

As it is, it looks not good to me.

So I started VBox XP in my Laptop and top shows

16748 kernelcr  20   0 1040m 874m  20m S 50.3%cpu 29.1mem   0:39.58 VirtualBox

For me mem shows

Mem:   3072396k total,  2270688k used,   801708k free,    55712k buffers
#8

I am installing updates, which is why the CPU is so high right now.

#9

Good to hear that:).

I forgot to say that with VirtualBox problems generally, it helps in the first post to mention which version you have (OSE from openSUSE repo, or Sun’s proprietary from virtualbox website), and which release e.g. 2.1.4 is latest Sun version.

Good luck.

#10

The version is 2.1.4