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Setting the OS X kernel asynchronous I/O limits to avoid VirtualBox crashing OS X

Posted on Fri, 2013/08/02 - 3:56pm

I had the need to setup a new VM for software testing today, and I kept running into intermittent problems where VirtualBox would freeze and then an OS X kernel panic, freezing/crashing the entire machine.

Luckily, I had made a snapshot in the OS moments earlier to the crash so I had a safe place to revert to, but the crashes kept happing at seemingly random times.

I setup a looped execution of 'dmesg' to see what was going on just before the crash and saw this at the next freeze:

VBoxDrv: host_vmxon  -> vmx_use_count=1 rc=0
VBoxDrv: host_vmxoff -> vmx_use_count=0
VBoxDrv: host_vmxon  -> vmx_use_count=1 rc=0
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.
aio_queue_async_request(): too many in flight for proc: 16.

The first VBoxDrv messages didn't pull anything interesting in Google, but the other messages did: Virtual Box ticket #11219 and this blog post.

It would appear that the default limits for the OS X kernel's asynchronous I/O are very, very low. VirtualBox likely exceeds them when your VM(s) are performing heavy disk I/O, hence the 'too many in flight' message in the logs.

Luckily for us, there's a quick and easy solution:

sudo sysctl -w  kern.aiomax=512 kern.aioprocmax=128 kern.aiothreads=16

then restart VirtualBox. These settings will apply until you reboot. To make the changes permanent, add/update the following lines in /etc/sysctl.conf:

kern.aiomax=512
kern.aioprocmax=128
kern.aiothreads=16

Note: you can probably set those limits even higher, as documentation for Sybase (by SAP) recommends values 2048 / 1024 / 16 when using its software.

Tags: 
VirtualBox
virtual machine
OS X

Comments

This is a test comment, please ignore.

Submitted by Stewart Adam on Mon, 2013/10/07 - 5:52pm

Verifying if email notifications for comment replies is still working.

Submitted by firewing1 on Mon, 2013/10/07 - 5:57pm

bash-3.2# cat /etc/sysctl.conf
kern.aiomax=2048
kern.aioprocmax=1024
kern.aiothreads=16
kern.sysv.shmall=1024
bash-3.2#
yours should be identical to mine

Submitted by firstimemacowner on Wed, 2014/04/30 - 1:22pm