Xenial vagrant image crashes under high disk I/O

[Giuseppe Iannello]

Xenial vagrant image for Virtualbox (20160822.0.0) uses SCSI as backend for virtual drives.

Under high disk I/O, either the LSILogic kernel driver or the LSIlogic emulation in Virtualbox start misbehaving, the kernel spits out errors and the vm gets corrupted up to the point that it will not reboot properly anymore.

We saw the error during the restore of a fairly small (2GB) mongo database, but we managed to reproduce the error using "stress-ng -d 4" (YMMV, sometimes "-d 2" is enough to reproduce the problem, sometimes you need a higher factor).
During the "stress-ng" run, the following error will appear in syslog

Aug 25 08:00:11 ubuntu kernel: [ 344.794932] mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=ffff8800da657b00)
Aug 25 08:00:11 ubuntu kernel: [ 344.794940] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#28 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 00 5e a8 00 00 08 00 00
Aug 25 08:00:11 ubuntu kernel: [ 344.924888] mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: FAILED (rv=2003) (sc=ffff8800da657b00)
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 351.788017] mptscsih: ioc0: attempting task abort! (sc=ffff8800d9ee1980)
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 351.788024] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 01 0c 78 00 00 08 00 00
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 351.900083] mptscsih: ioc0: task abort: FAILED (rv=2003) (sc=ffff8800d9ee1980)
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 351.900089] mptscsih: ioc0: attempting target reset! (sc=ffff8800da657b00)
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 351.900095] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#28 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 00 5e a8 00 00 08 00 00
Aug 25 08:00:18 ubuntu kernel: [ 352.012014] mptscsih: ioc0: target reset: SUCCESS (sc=ffff8800da657b00)

Switching the virtual drives to an emulated SATA bus makes stress-ng run without issues.

[Michael Thayer (michael-thayer)]

This has been identified and fixed upstream in VirtualBox and will be a part of any future 5.0, 5.1 or later releases, as well as test builds[1] as of revision 112195. Please feel free to point the VirtualBox team to this sort of thing in future, on our bug-tracker or on IRC.

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Testbuilds

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

This sounds like a Virtualbox bug, so marking as invalid for our images.