LHC@home

VirtualBox 5.2 (released 2017-10-18)

This is a major update. The following major new features were added:

-VM export to Oracle Cloud (OPC)
-Unattended guest installation (bug #5810; see the manual for more information)
-Overhauled VM selector GUI (improved tools VM / global tools handling, new icons)
-Added experimental audio support for video recording

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

-VMM: fixed reason for recent Linux kernels on also recent CPU models warning about "XSAVE consistency problem"
-GUI: Virtual Media Manager rework allowing to manage media attributes, like size, location, type and description
-GUI: Host-only Network Manager implemented to simplify managing corresponding networks and their attributes
-GUI: Snapshot Pane rework allowing to manage snapshot attributes, like name and description; reworked snapshot details which looks more clear, corresponds to VM Details pane and reflects current VM state difference according to last snapshot taken
-GUI: Audio settings extended with possibility to enable/disable audio input/output; corresponding changed were done to Audio and Video Capture settings pages; VM Devices menu and status-bar extended with corresponding actions and indicator as well
-GUI: improvements with accessibility support
-GUI: Fixed double mouse cursor when using mouse integration without Guest Additions, actually a Qt 5.6 bug fixed with QT 5.6.3 (Mac OS X hosts only; bug #15610)
-Audio: implemented (optional) device enumeration support for audio backends
-Audio: implemented support for host device callbacks (e.g. when adding or removing an audio device)
-Audio: HDA emulation now uses asynchronous data processing in separate threads
-Audio: implemented ability to enable or disable audio input / output on-the-fly
-Storage: implemented support for CUE/BIN images as CD/DVD media including multiple tracks
-Storage: implemented support for the controller memory buffer feature for NVMe
-Storage: first milestone of the I/O stack redesign landed
E1000: Fix for Windows XP freeze when booting with unplugged cable
-NAT network: do not skip some port forwarding setup when multiple VMs are active (Windows hosts only; bug #17041)
-Serial: fixed extremely rare misbehavior on VM poweroff
-EFI: better video mode handling, supporting custom video modes and easier configuration (bug #6783)
-BIOS: properly report floppy logical sectors per track for unusual formats
-BIOS: update ATA disk parameter table vectors only if there is actually a corresponding ATA disk attached
-PXE: speed up booting by better handling pending packets when the link is not up yet
-VBoxManage: handle CPUID sub-leaf overrides better
-Windows Additions: fix several 3D related crashes
-Solaris hosts: allow increasing MTU size for host-only adapter to 9706 bytes to support jumbo frames
-Linux Additions: on systems using systemd, make sure that only the Guest Additions timesync service is active

many unlisted fixes and improvements

Maybe in -dev this new release can be tested.

In Production we need the ok of the Projects from Cern in combination with the Boinc-client for free use.

For Virtualbox 5.1.x is 5.1.30 the latest Build.

It works in Atlas on my main Linux box, SuSE Leap 42.2. There is a nice penguin in the VirtualBox Manager page.
Tullio

VirtualBox 5.2.0 is working fine on my Win7 64-bit machine for running CMS, LHCb and Theory. I have returned one LHCb in 7 hours, and the others are at the 9 1/2 hour point.

EDIT: This is on an i7-4771, with four cores on BOINC projects (LHC and Einstein), and one core supporting a GTX 1060 on Folding. The other three cores are free.
From the estimates, it looks like the CMS and Theory will run up against the 18 hour limit. Whether that is typical these days I don't know.

since after the most recent Win10 Service Update of today my VB 5.1.22 was no longer working, I installed VB 5.2, and it works fine.

For more information, please look up my posting:
https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=4491

VirtualBox version 5.2.0 is running fine on my Windows7 64bit machine.

However vboxwrapper version 26196 used for ATLAS creates directly after the start of the wrapper an error line in the stderr.txt:
Error creating VirtualBox instance! rc = 0x80004002
When I used VirtualBox v5.1.30 that error line wasn't there.

Vboxwrapper version 26198ab5 used for Theory doesn't has this error line in stderr.txt neither in VBox 5.2.0. nor v5.1.30 or earlier versions.

In spite of that error written in all cases the ATLAS-VM's are created and working OK.

VirtualBox version 5.2.0 is running fine on my Windows7 64bit machine.

However vboxwrapper version 26196 used for ATLAS creates directly after the start of the wrapper an error line in the stderr.txt:
Error creating VirtualBox instance! rc = 0x80004002
When I used VirtualBox v5.1.30 that error line wasn't there.

same here, since I yesterday installed VirtualBox v5.2.0 on my Windows10 64-bit machine:

<stderr_txt>
2017-10-23 15:26:37 (2960): vboxwrapper (7.7.26196): starting
2017-10-23 15:26:38 (2960): Error creating VirtualBox instance! rc = 0x80004002
2017-10-23 15:26:38 (2960): Feature: Checkpoint interval offset (2 seconds)
2017-10-23 15:26:38 (2960): Detected: VirtualBox VboxManage Interface (Version: 5.2.0)

And, this has not been the case with VirtualBox v5.1.22 which was running until yesterday.

And: in spite of that error written in all cases the ATLAS-VM's are created and working OK.

Since LHC heavily utilizes VirtualBox, I wanted to see if anybody was having issues having upgrade to 5.2

On SourceFinder, we've discovered that it does not work properly. I tested it after a couple others reported having problems and saw that Headless tasks were taking up cores fully and making BOINC think the computer was busy. It'd eventually come out of that state, restart at the same checkpoint, and repeat this 2-3 more times before BOINC thought there was an error while the tasks were still running in VirtualBox.

It looks there's some odd behavior occurring over here too...

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It absolutely doesn't work on my Windows7 box at work. Even a self-generated VM crashes. In fairness, earlier 5-series versions also fail, but in the "VM failed to enter a usable state within 10 minutes" sort of way, so there's something incompatible in the machine.
I've not tried 5.2 on any Linux machine yet...

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It runs OK on Atlas in my SuSE Leap 42.2 Linux box.
Tullio

For Linux, there is a note for Virtualbox (Guest-Addition from 17/11/3):

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

VirtualBox 5.2.0 works perfectly also on SuSE Leap 42.3, at least on Atlas tasks. All other LHC tasks, except SixTrack, fail for unknown reasons.
Tullio