From what i can tell it looks like the upgrade turned off “IO APIC” – this is the bit that seemed to cause the problem. Re-enabling this on all of my linux boxes seems to have fixed the problem. I’ll continue testing for another week and update this post if any problems re-occur.

Updated : 01/09/2009

Here is a bit more on IO APIC from the virtualbox wiki…  (from a windows perspective)
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

The hardware dependent portion of the Windows kernel is dubbed “Hardware Abstraction Layer” (HAL). While hardware vendor specific HALs have become very rare, there are still a number of HALs shipped by Microsoft. Here are the most common HALs (for more information, refer to this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309283):

Hal.dll (Standard PC)
Halacpi.dll (ACPI HAL)
Halaacpi.dll (ACPI HAL with IO APIC)

If you perform a Windows installation with default settings in VirtualBox, Halacpi.dll will be chosen as VirtualBox enables ACPI by default but disables the IO APIC by default. A standard installation on a modern physical PC or VMware will usually result in Halaacpi.dll being chosen as most systems nowadays have an IO APIC and VMware chose to virtualize it by default (VirtualBox disables the IO APIC because it is more expensive to virtualize than a standard PIC). So as a first step, you either have to enable IO APIC support in VirtualBox or replace the HAL. Replacing the HAL can be done by booting the VM from the Windows CD and performing a repair installation.

Updated : 5/09/2009

I’ve had even more problems with opensolaris crashing completely after upgrading to the newer versions of virtualbox (3.0.4), and have since reverted back to 2.2.0 which has fixed alot of the hanging issues i have encountered

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yum -y install dhcp.i386 bind.i386

Set services to auto start using ntsysv — services are called “dhcpd” and “named”.

How to configure dhcp;

nano /etc/dhcpd.conf — configure as per sample provided. The sample is usually located in the same directory.
service dhcpd restart – should start without problem if done correctly

Note: dhcp range has to be on the same network as your adapter. You can run dhcpd from the command line to diagnose any issues.

How to configure bind (DNS);

I usually just forward DNS requests to my internal router. To do this just edit /etc/resolve.conf and place the following line in the file;

nameserver 192.168.9.1

Use your ip above then all should be good. Test by pinging a domain like www.yahoo.com etc… You should get an ip back even if you don’t get successful pings (due to firewall etc). nslookup is also another quick and easy way to check DNS requests.

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Logon to your distro. The packages you need are the kernel-devel.i686, kernel.i686 (if not the latest), and gcc.i386 (complier)

yum -y install kernel.i686 gcc.i386

reboot as the kernel needs to load, then logon again install the kernel dev; 

yum -y install kernel-devel.i686

Now you want to present the virtualbox additions to the cdrom drive on your distro. Click “install additions” on the virtualbox guest console. 

then back on the box mount the cdrom to a directory (make one if you dont have one avail) 

mkdir /mnt/cdrom

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom 

Now go to the newly mounted cdrom drive and find the installation;

cd /mnt/cdrom 

Execute the installer, and if all goes well reboot. Services should auto start and sync your time etc. 

./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run

reboot

logon and check your time; 

date

Done.

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First you need to make sure your in the /etc/cron.d/cron.allow file. If you are not SU to root and add yourself into it.

Now to create your new crontab file;

crontab -e

You are in vi in your newly created crontab file (note if you do not have access to do this it will say so)

Now, i’m no expert at using vi, but if you press i you will go into insert mode. Do this, then type the cron job details. A typical cron job will look like this

0 4 * * * /export/home/user/backup.sh

so there are five slots before the command you want to run. They are: min, hour, day, month, day-week. So my example above will run at 4am every day. See below for more detail.

once you have entered the line press ESC then type :wq to save and quit.

To confirm the job has been saved successfully in cron type this command;

crontab -l  this will show you your current scheduled tasks, it should output the above job.

In OpenSolaris the crontab files are located at /var/spool/cron/crontabs/ they are named after the specific user. Sometimes its easier to go there than to use vi, but make sure your permissions are all set correctly before editing any system files.

In some distros there are folders like /etc/cron.daily/ which run any scripts inside them on a schedule matching the folder name.

This is a bit more on the format of the 5 timings within the crontab file;

*     *   *   *    *  command to be executed

|     |     |     |     |
|     |     |     |     +—– day of week (0 – 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |     +——- month (1 – 12)
|     |     +——— day of month (1 – 31)
|     +———– hour (0 – 23)
+————- min (0 – 59)

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date -s “09/21/2007 09:20:00″

hwclock –systohc

the second command links the time back to the hardware clock.

Note: within a vm guest it is always advised to install the guest additions as the time on a guest can slowly move away from the correct time.

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You must insure that your drives are using the sata driver (if they are sata disks), quickest way to check is that they will be called sda sdb etc…. and not hda hdb, as this is the default IDE driver and will slow down the performance majorly.

How to check performance;

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Modern drives should be getting over 50MB/s easily. If your getting about 5MB/s you have the problem.

How to Fix;

I had to change the sata mode to Enhanced in the bios and disable any of the on-board IDE controllers. When rebooting all your device names will change, and you will need to edit the /etc/fstab file as appropriate.

Apparently this is due to a conflict in the drivers, and them confusing your SATA drives as standard IDE disks.

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• Always use only 1 Virtual CPU – i have found that most times even if you have heaps of cores to spare on the host, a single virtual core is faster.
• Set the memory to the recommended level when possible – 256Mb sounds shit when you have 4gb, doesn’t matter – set it to 256Mb (increase only if excessive paging on the guest). Let linux and vmware manage the memory, in most cases it does a much better job than windows. Do not disable memory page trimming on any of the guests, this gives more memory back to the host to cache other more important activity (disk etc)
• Never use 2gb split files for the virtual disk unless you have to transfer the vm onto a file system that doesn’t support larger files.
• Load the latest drivers for your NIC on the host
• Be nice to your physical disk – do not load all your VM’s on a single drive – the HDD is the slowest part of the system, dont saturate it. I use either a raid 0 running multiple vm’s (with backups) or dedicated drives per set of vm’s. This excludes enterprise level raids which can handle much higher level of simultaneous requests.
• Install vmware tools on all guest machines

watch your pings – ping your guests… they should never loose a ping. If they do you are loading the cpu to high and the host cannot process the network queries. As above use only one virtual cpu. Also ensure you have the latest network driver loaded for your NIC on the host.

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