LHC@home

I have a job on this system, it is, and has been for at least the last 24 hours, in an unusual, to me, state. It's status is shown as...

Postponed: VM Hypervisor failed to enter an online state in a timely fashion.

... okay, so is this something that will, at some point, enter an online state, or is the job just hung?

The work unit is...

CMS_24868_1505498727.617335_0

... of application...

CMS Simulation 47.60 (vbox64)

... running here under Windows 8.1 x64. It has had 2:33:05 CPU and is showing 12.666% complete.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

2 options:

- wait 86400 seconds
- stop BOINC-client (not only the Manager) and restart BOINC

I first noticed this yesterday morning, so it has already been at least 24 hours since whatever happened, happened. It was quiet, so I rebooted the system, which would, of course, stop and start BOINC. Upon restarting, the job started running again, no new progress was shown, it is still 12.666%, and after about 10 minutes, it went back into that strange state, where it is currently sitting. The elapsed dropped back a bit from the checkpoint load, but it has advanced until 2:33:06, almost identical to the time before where this happened. "Fixes" have involved some chmod and chown commands, but I am not running Linux.

It is a quorum and replication of 1 so I cannot see if a wingman has got anywhere with it.

I've not seen that status before.

<edit>
A net search has shown this same status showing up at other projects, Cosmology and RNA for example. Fixes have suggested updating VirtualBox, (to 5.1.28), which I, and others have tried, but it has not helped yet.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

... but it has. I was fiddling with this to see what or where the problem was, which inevitably had me stop and start the system a few times. Now, I can see that the job IS running again, and has advanced to 13.207%, so perhaps the VirtualBox update, followed by a restart, is a fix.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

I've seen that on most of the fora of BOINC-projects using VirtualBox.

IMO the problem is caused due to busy systems and the difference between the process priority of VBoxSVC.exe and BOINC's vboxwrapper.

VBoxSVC.exe has the priority 'normal' -> user priority and
vboxwrapper has the lowest priority.

On my systems both processes get both the priority 'below normal' and never see this problem.

It is the first time I have seen it, but looking around the projects, it has been seen by others at other projects. The updated VirtualBox APPEARS to have fixed it for me, the task that was stopped is running and currently is showing 25.402% done.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

My Windows box at work has always been like that, except with the oldest versions of VBox. Maybe it's time to try the latest again.

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The job that was stuck has continued to run here after the fix and is now 30.444% complete. It APPEARS to have corrected some issue but I wouldn't guarantee it. Try it again with an updated VirtualBox, but keep an eye on it. Perhaps an idea to keep hold of the older version installer so you can go back if necessary. I have not updated my other machine here yet, but then, I have not seen the problem on it, machine is almost identical to this one though, hardware and software.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

The job has completed and uploaded overnight, is flagged as valid and been credited.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

argh, it don't work, sorry

Hi, Rantanplan,
Can you be more specific as to what the problem is so we have a better idea as to how to help you?
I see a few errors but mostly successful CMS, Atlas and Theory tasks across all your machines.