[rescue] A wee bit off-topic

[Meelis Roos]

>    Who here works with Sun's VirtualBox atop Linux?  I've got such
> and instance at $PPOE and am seeining horrible stability problems
> with CentOS 7 and VirtualBox 4.3.28 -- lockups, mainly, with the
> VBoxSVC executable going deaf to vboxmanage's requests.  The only
> way out is to kill VBoxSVC, and the collateral damage from that is
> that all the VMs die as well.

I had a generic Core2Duo 8400 + 8G RAM combo for VirtualBox VM-s and had 
occasional stability problems and snapshot corruption for a long time. 
Finally found that the hardware was bad. After replacing the hardware, 
it has worked fine.

When I supervised an OS lab at the univeristy, we told our students to 
use VirtualBox so the environment would be same for users of all laptop 
OSes they had (Windows, OSX, Linux). In every classroom full of 
students, there were about 1-2 students who had recurring trouble with 
VirtualBox. To make things worse, many of the students had identical 
laptops and some of the misbehaving ones were identical to the working 
ones... we tried to fix it software-wise (one student even reinstelled 
his host OS multiple times to get things working). In retrospect I still 
do not know if they were hardware or software problems. Only one problem 
we identified as VirtualBox problem but that hit many students and we 
told them to pick the previous minor release for a fix.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)