Error when trying to start BitCurator in VM on FRED

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Hi all,

I'm trying to install BitCurator on our FRED using a virtual machine. I followed all the instructions in the Quick Start Guide.  It looks like everything is set up, but when I try to start BitCurator, I'm getting the following error message:

watchdog: BUG : soft lockup - CPU#2 stuck for 20480s! [kworker/2:0:25]

watchdog: BUG : soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 32s! [swapper/0:1]  

Anyone know what this means or what to do about it? I'm completely stumped.

/ Lara Friedman-Shedlov

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Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov    (she / they)  (hear my name)

Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections | www.lib.umn.edu/special

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[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Anyone?  Bueller?  

/ Lara :-)

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Hi all,

See my original message below.  I've been experimenting with this some more and found that EVENTUALLY, if I leave the VM window open long enough, BitCurator *does* start up.  We're talking 10 or 15 minutes before the BC desktop loads.  And then it is very slow and unresponsive, basically unusable.  I've devoted 4 processors and plenty of extra base memory to it, so that doesn't seem to be the issue.  Here's a screen shot of my settings:

Still hoping someone can help shed some light on what the problem might be!

/ Lara

[Euan Cochrane]

It's a long shot but: do you know where the VM's drive image is stored? Loading from a network location could slow it down a lot. 

Best,

Euan

[Kam Woods]

Of note, there's a new pre-built VM available (2.2.16) at https://github.com/BitCurator/bitcurator-distro/wiki/Releases that you may wish to try. The older 2.2.8 VM and the new release have been retested and tested respectively on a selection of hosts (Windows 10, Windows 11 beta, macOS 11.2, and Ubuntu 18.04/20.04) in Virtualbox 6.1.26 with the 6.1.26 Extension Pack installed and with 4GB RAM and 2 processors assigned.

A few other thoughts in addition to Euan's suggestion. Issues like reported CPU lockups in the VM can sometimes happen when VirtualBox itself is damaged. Removing and reinstalling is a good idea if you haven't already tried it, along with ensuring the latest VirtualBox and VirtualBox Extension Pack are installed, and that the latest Windows updates (or at least, the latest available to you if you're on an Enterprise license) are in place.

It may also help to bring up the Windows Task Manager on the host on startup to see which applications or background processes (aside from VirtualBox) are using a lot of processor or memory. Sometimes errant antivirus scans, enterprise management apps, or other 3rd party tools can lead to degraded behavior.

The new 2.2.16 VM has many core OS updates and is running the latest (6.1.26) VirtualBox guest extensions, so that may also help if none of the above does.

Kam

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[jfca...@gmail.com]

It may be worth troubleshooting with an older version of VirtualBox, I had some errors unrelated to your issue with a VM in Windows 10 a while ago and was fixed by reverting to v. 5.2. But it looks like Oracle no longer maintains some of the old versions as they were doing until last year: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Thanks to those who replied with suggestions.  Much appreciated.  It'll probably be a couple of weeks before I have a chance to do further investigations, but hopefully one of these ideas will be the key to solving our problem.  

/ Lara

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcurator-users/9e528aaa-641e-4f8d-ace9-a73e37a10087n%40googlegroups.com.