Bug with 2 VMs on dual-core iMac

[cedric]

I've had very good success with using Parallels and either an OpenBSD 3.8 or Windows 2K VM.
However, if I run both VM together, then hell breaks loose. What I mean is that sooner or
later, one of the two VM enter a busy loop, (top shows 100% CPU used by one Parallels task)
and the system either stops or becomes very sluggish.

It is impossible to recover from this situation, kill or kill -9 (force quit) fail. Only a hard reset
on the iMac "fix" the issue. Has anyone else seen that behaviour? I've already reported that
on beta6, and I really hoped that RC would fix it

 

[dirk@hohndel.org]

I had this before when both tried to use sound or USB or a physical device like CD. I have an OpenSuSE 10.1 and an XP/SP2 running in parallel (neither of which has either of the devices mentioned enabled) and this is running quite well.

/D

 

[Andrew @ Parallels]

Thanks for reporting - we will check this.

 

[cedric]

I've no sound, no usb and no CD on the OpenBSD vm, but it crashes the same way.
The following TOP output was taken when the system was totally idle.

I did the following:

1) Start windows 2K VM (I guess it's processes 194/195). I've used it 1hour without
any issue.
2) Start OpenBSD VM. No problem here so far.
3) Start a compilatopm on OpenBSD VM, and at the same time start NetBeans on
the Win2K VM. Both operation are disk-intensive, and Netbeans is very RAM
hungry.
4) Netbeans has not completely started after 5 minutes. The windows is up, but
"Scanning Project Classpaths" is hung at 34%.

At this point, both VM still work, OSX is fine (I guess running on the other core), but
the Win2K VM feel like you're on an i386. Moving a windows is slow and so on.

Processes:  49 total, 3 running, 46 sleeping... 174 threads            07:33:27
Load Avg:  1.68, 1.81, 1.20     CPU usage:  2.3% user, 59.3% sys, 38.3% idle
SharedLibs: num =  143, resident = 25.2M code, 3.10M data, 4.02M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num =  6314, resident =  120M + 10.8M private, 1014M shared
PhysMem:   862M wired,  445M active,  700M inactive, 1.96G used, 37.2M free
VM: 7.33G + 88.1M   179471(0) pageins, 1061(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  224 top          5.7%  0:51.84   1    18    20   720K   736K  1.17M  26.9M
  223 bash         0.0%  0:00.00   1    14    16   208K  1000K   796K  27.1M
  222 login        0.0%  0:00.01   1    16    40   164K   736K   644K  26.9M
  220 Terminal     0.3%  0:03.25   4    91   136  2.25M  8.38M  9.02M   232M 
  218 Parallels    0.0%  0:00.00   1     8    77  1.89M  9.95M   604K  96.7M
  217 Parallels    3.7%  5:29.91  10   115   364  19.8M   354M  73.6M   767M
  215 ZTerm        0.2%  0:11.61   2    78   139  14.3M  6.99M  20.1M   340M
  209 Safari       0.3%  0:12.53   6   124   225  11.5M  13.7M  22.8M   246M
  205 cupsd        0.0%  0:00.02   2    29    25   436K  1.09M  1.57M  27.8M
  204 translated   0.0%  0:00.02   1    11    20   172K  1.05M   232K  28.2M
  195 Parallels    0.0%  0:00.00   1     8    72  1.81M  11.1M   612K  96.7M
  194 Parallels  105.1% 20:41.32  17   191   448  27.1M   622M   320M  1.03G
  192 mdimport     0.0%  0:00.11   3    61    43   776K  1.88M  2.41M  38.6M
  189 prl_dhcpd    0.0%  0:00.24   1    13    29  2.38M  1.45M  2.94M  32.8M
  181 mds          0.0%  0:00.96   8    90    63  2.18M  1.69M  3.34M  42.9M
  159 crashrepor   0.0%  0:00.00   1    16    18   112K   712K   204K  26.6M
  130 automount    0.0%  0:00.01   3    40    32   304K  1.02M  1.07M  28.7M
  126 automount    0.0%  0:00.01   3    42    36   312K  1.07M  1.11M  29.0M
  123 rpc.lockd    0.0%  0:00.00   1    10    18   116K   768K   192K  26.7M
  114 nfsiod       0.0%  0:00.00   5    30    25   108K   696K   184K  28.6M
  100 ntpd         0.0%  0:00.27   1    10    19   184K   788K   372K  27.1M
   86 lookupd      0.0%  0:00.09   2    34    40   484K  1.07M  1.25M  28.5M
   84 iTunesHelp   0.0%  0:00.03   1    52    71   504K  2.73M  1.79M   209M
   81 Finder       0.0%  0:00.60   3   107   135  4.18M  7.42M  8.51M   240M
   79 SystemUISe   0.0%  0:04.65   2   218   202  4.18M  6.10M  9.43M   242M
   78 Dock         0.0%  0:02.31   2    88   117  1.18M  16.5M  10.5M   207M

 

[cedric]

Hmm, this time, after waiting 5 more minutes, the system recovered by itself. let's see.

 

[cedric]

This bug is not fixed on RC2. while I've not been able to reproduce the crash,
having 2 VMs running is imposssible for me.