Occasional Black screen, unresponsive VM

M

MG_work

Member
I have a Mac Pro with Parallels 4.0.3844, and as guest OS Ubuntu 8.04 with Parallels Tools installed (thanks!)
My primary use for this is to run subversion & store the subversion repository.
This worked without fail before upgrading to Parallels 4 last week. The only changes to this VM since two weeks ago are (1) upgrading Parallels, (2) automatic updates to the VM, and (3) of course, subversion commits.

The problem that appeared this week is that every once in a while I'll find the VM completely unresponsive and its screen is completely black. This happens every 2-16 hours. Then I can't commit changes remotely & I can't get the GUI to respond (e.g. wake up from this black 'sleep'). I don't recognize any problems from the system log fwiw.

So my questions:
a) Is this a Parallels problem?
b) Anyone know a fix? I really want this repository to be available without me needed to reset!
 
A little more detail: unresponsive but not blacked out

Once, I've caught Ubuntu being completely unresponsive but not blacked-out. You can see the desktop but not interact with anything (can't drag any windows, can't activate any menus or buttons). So the blackness may not be a symptom; perhaps the screen is somehow succeeding at sleeping after a while.
 
Cause appears to be multiple processors

I've been experimenting.

When my VM is configured to use multiple processors (tested using 2 and 4 processors), the VM becomes unresponsive within 8 hours (usually much less). When my VM is configured to use a single processor, the VM works fine for at least 5 days (the longest test period so far).

(This is a quad core Mac Pro with two 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeons. I'm also running a Windows XP VM using two cores without problem.)

So if anyone else has this problem, change your configuration to use a single core until Parallels responds.

For anyone at Parallels, this isnow problem report ID 385966 since I managed to "report a problem" to send as much of the relevant data as possible. I submitted that after the VM black-screened while using 2 processors.
 
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