Ubuntu 16.04 hangs immediately every time I start a new machine in VirtualBox

Question

I have tried a machine with Ubuntu 16.04 32- and 64-bit and Ubuntu 17.10 64-bit several times. Intel Virtualisation is enabled in BIOS. Secure boot is disabled. It happens on kernels 4.13.0-26-generic and 4.13.0-31-generic. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I installed and purged gnome-boxes earlier. An example of a consequence of that is that a system user Libvirt Qemu still appears on the login screen and I am afraid that removing it might break something. Interestingly, VirtualBox seemed to work well when I installed it inside an Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine in the aforementioned gnome-boxes although unsurprisingly the machines run by it were very slow.

Solution 1

Same here, solved by installing Virtualbox 5.1.30 from the website.

Solution 2

I had the same Problem after upgrading my Kernel to 4.13.0-26-generic I selected my previous Kernel 4.10.0-42-generic in grub on boot time and it worked.

My guess is that there is a problem in the most recent Kernel. (4.13.0-26 at the time of this writing) Problem is, that is the one with a Patch for the vulnerability CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown).

Solution 3

This happened to me too. I had to install Virtual Box 5.2.6 and after that I had no problem running vms. However, I did have an issue with Virtual Box 5.2.6 and my iwlwifi driver on my laptop. The computer would just randomly hang. Took me a few days to figure out. Had no problem with other wifi adapter using other drivers. There was an issue with kernel 4.14 with Virtual Box 5.2.6 and iwlwifi. I had no issues prior to the new kernel with the older version of VB

Comments

[Nathan Beach]

this is happening to me trying to use rawdisk for a simple Windows 10 guest VM. VirtualBox just immediately freezes the whole host (elementary OS / xenial).

[geras]

If you install it from the website, do you then get automatic updates? Or do you need to install it from the website again every time you want to update it?

[geras]

I think it didn't work for me, although I'm not entirely sure if I did it correctly and now for some reason I am unable access the grub menu so I can't check it again.

[Thomas Ward]

@geras You have to go update it yourself - you won't get automatic updates. unless they started serving their own VirtualBox repository with updates in it, and that's added, but I doubt they have that.

[geras]

@ThomasWard I have actually managed to add a repository and install VirtualBox 5.2.6 from there as described here: virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads in section "Debian-based Linux distributions" so I believe I should be getting automatic updates with Software Updater.

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

Related: askubuntu.com/questions/995819/…