So it turns out enabling the ioapic option for my linux vm running withint Virtualbox was not the solution to all of my vm woes. Since December I’ve been through several other “solutions”. Each time I think I’ve found the root cause of the crashing and resolved it. This time, I’m just hoping that I am one step closer to having this fixed.

What have I done this time? I’ve set the kernel to use the correct driver for the network card in the box. It turns out that the NIC I have is a Realtek 8168… but modprobe decided to use a Realtek 8169 driver instead. Apparently this causes all sorts of issues…. possibly the ones I’ve been seeing.

Anyway some smart cookie has written up a nice script to remove the wrong module, compile a new one, and even nicely make the change persistent through reboots. This can be found here.

This box has previously been perfectly stable for a month…. and then crashed repeatedely for a few days until I “fixed” it again. I’ve given the network card a good thrashing already, so if its stable for the next two months… I’ll declare victory. Until then, fingers crossed.

edit: Forgot to mention that previously when copying to/from SMB shares, I’d get kernel memory errors…. which I’d “fixed” by increasing the figure in /proc/sys/vm.min_free_kbytes from its default up to 32000. It didn’t completely fix the issue, but it did partially alleviate the issues. Also I’m running Debian 5 AMD64, but according to the site I linked earlier, this issue is present in most recent Debian and Ubuntu releases.