Starting a virtual machine crashes Mac Pro (new Intel tower)

Parallels was working fine on my Mac Pro after doing the "sudo nvram boot-args="-legacy"" command in Terminal. Then today I added another 1GB RAM (2GB total) and it doesn't work - I get the hypervisor error when I try to start the VM.

 

I ran the patch and all of a sudden, parallels seems to work... kind of.

I installed Fedora Core 4 from the DVD image (.iso file), when I re-booted from the hard disk it croaked (bug report option window, etc.). I tried again and it worked! Basically every other time I run it, it's fine / not fine.

My major challenge now is getting the networking to flow. We are in a heavy linux environment with 50+ machines and all users remote mounting home directories using NIS. I can get linux up to the prompt, login as root and ping my other machines, even do an "ls" on small remote directories. If I try and "cd" though or request other than a tiny amount of information... it hangs.

I'm guessing this is a "network bridging" related issue. On to that adventure.

For now... the parch seems to have gotten us semi-operational. Thanks.

 

Works here

I installed the latest beta software and copied an XP virtual machine file over from a Mac Book Pro. I had to use the second (maxmem) terminal command to make it work, but have started and shutdown the Mac and virtual machine several times without incident. I'm still nervous about it, but it is working so far...

I got the Mac Pro to replace a Mac and PC for engineering work, would really like to see Parallels rock solid, or at least as solid as a PC can be.

 

Work-around almost works

Applied the nvram workaround and now my VM starts and works (mostly). I found the following two problems:

1. Rebooting WinXP causes Parallels to crash (at least it isn't causing the OSX kernel panics). I email the reports from both crashes.

2. There appears to be a problem with the networking and handling of fragmented packets. IP packets < 1500 (no fragmentation needed) pass through the networking without problem. Send anything that requires frags and problems occur. Tonight I will perform some tcpdumps to determine if the whole packet was dropped or just the fragment. Interesting enough - Q also has networking issues with a Mac Pro, but works fine on my Mac Book Pro. Does anyone know if the networking layer has changed for Mac Pros?

Jim

 

I tried the nvram workaround. It worked but broke Quicken 2007 (OS X). I am back to waiting...

 

Just bought a Mac Pro...

I was previously an owner of a Dual 2.5 machine. I really didn't want to buy a Mac Pro because I was VERY satisified with it; however, I am a software engineer whose daytime job is to work exclusively on a PC and I also do contract jobs outside of my job. The Mac Pro was a perfect solution to my needs to allow me to work with Mac stuff for productivity purposes while I could use Parallels to do my contract work. I know about Boot Camp but I want to be able to run OS X and XPuke at the same time.

It was really disappointing to learn thath there was an issue with Parallels and Mac Pro. I have been beta testing Parallels on an Intel Mac Mini and it was all nice.

Only if they provided support for iSight or webcams, my company would be buying 100 licenses from them today; however, I have not heard one word from Parallels (I've sent them several emails and no avail).

While Parallels has done an impressive job wth the software, their customer service really needs work.

Without further ado, I really hope to see a fix for Mac Pro soon because I've just shelled $79.99 and there was no WARNING of any kind about the Mac Pro until I came into this forum.............

G'day ya all.

 

I also had this issue. It seems as though certain 'operations' will set the boot-args back to the default. After the machine hung, I simply went back to terminal and reset the boot-args back to "-legacy". Parallels is now running smoothly, though I cannot get the network adapter to work at all.

I've also had some problems when automatically starting the VM. It seems to work best when manually selecting your VM, then manually starting (booting). Setting Parallels to "Load recently used VM at startup" would sometimes result in an "Untitled VM" being loaded which would cause an error when booting.

Windows XP Pro boots in 14 seconds, much faster than I've ever seen before (I've used Windows machines for the past 16 years). and three times quicker than on my MacBook Pro.

 

Networking Fix!!

I finally have XP Pro (2002) working with networking. I applied the nvram workaround and had to make some adjustments to the Windows Registry. See http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/105/38.shtml#win2k for full details. The fix is to manually add (set) the MTU key for all (two) network adaptors I found in the registry. I used 1500 as the value. I also added (set) the EnablePMTUDiscovery value at 0.

As an aside, before I applied the fix, I was able to browse to all sites Google (search, map, mail, etc) without trouble and one or two other sites, but in general everything else just hung. With the fix all sites now work.

Also, most of the time when I restarted the XP VM after making any adjustments Parallels would crash to the report screen. I just unchecked the send email report box, and tried again. If this happened it would take 2 or 3 retries and then XP would launch fine.

With everything adjusted, the XP VM is running very fast!!

 

Tried it with XP; no joy. I too can get to google sites but nothing else, including my Windows based LAN.

 

What does this workaround do to OS X?

Does this workaround, even if it succeeds in launching a virtual machine, impact OS X? What are the side effects of this fix?

 

Well I have accessed my Windows LAN by lowering the MTU value to 64, but still no websites except for Google.

 

Unless you are running 64 bit software I don't see what impact it would possibly have. And if it does somehow effect OS X it's still faster than anything I've ever used...

 

Success! See:

http://forums.parallels.com/thread3795.html

Unfortunately, upon inititial inspection, FC4 on my 2.66 MacPro looks like it's only running about 45% as fast as an 242 Opteron. This observation was made running 100 frames of generic image compositing tasks which access disks and heavily process.

Next is to see where it's clogging up... processing? disk access? network? + anyone have an idea where to look to get mouse mapping to be more of a pass through?

 

Have you tried Parallels tools from the VM dropdown menu. I believe there are not many tools included for any OS's other than Win, but it's worth a shot. One of the tools is a mouse synchronizer.

 

Networking... working

I changed the MTU values to 1024 on each of the three network adapters that are listed in my registry, that seemed to do the trick. I can now access my LAN as well as the internet at large. This 3Ghz machine is very fast. I'll install AutoCad 2007 later and see how that performs under Parallels...

 

Network Fix (amended)

One other thing I did, which I had to do again a few minutes ago, was to manually toggle the MTU for the built-in Ethernet on the OS X side. Use the System Preferences -> Network. For Show drop-down select Ethernet 1 (or whichever one you're using), click on Ethernet tab. Change Configure from Automatic to Manual (Advanced). Click on the Jumbo MTU radio button, click on Apply Now. Then click back on the Standard MTU radio button, click on Apply Now. No idea why, but this appears to allow XP to work properly. This worked while the VM was running.

 

On the Mac Pro, does anyone get the message about some virtualization not being enabled in the BIOS?

T

 

MTU of 1024 with EnablePMTUDiscovery finally did it for me too, on the RealTek adapter. I also used the nvram setting at 2048.

Looks good right now.

Mac Pro 4x3.0GHz 2G RAM 2x500MB HD 2x7300 GT

 

Yeah I got that one too. If I remember correctly it is related to the Intel VT-X support, which apparently our processors do support but it is locked out in the BIOS, Even though it is turned on in Parallels preferences. I would have to assume that this will be addressed in the next Parallels update.

 

Setting MTU worked, but ...

I did some tcpdumps and found that parallels and the bridge was properly fragmenting outbound packets. The problem seems to be in handling the inbound fragments, which explains why we all see web sites hang.

The main problem with disabling MTUD and setting the MTU to 1024 is paths to networks where the MTU is < 1024 won't work. Granted this is probably a very small number of paths that don't handle this, but you just won't know if the site is down or if there is an MTU problem.

Now the real question is why is parallels not handing fragments on the Mac Pro. This works just fine on my Macbook Pro.