Re: em problem in virtualbox since the weekend

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 07:41:26 -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 19, 2011 10:35:42 pm Steve Wills wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> While testing some other things, I found -CURRENT from yesterday doesn't
>> work with the em0 in my VirtualBox 4.0.8 (a little out of date
>> admittedly). It worked Friday or Saturday I think. Anyone else seen this
>> or should I open a PR? Has the code changed or am I perhaps
>> misremembering dates? The error reported is:
>>
>> em0: Unable to allocate bus resource: memory
>> em0: Allocation of PCI resources failed
> 
> This is due to a bug in VirtualBox's BIOS implementation.  Someone
> should file
> a bug report with VirtualBox to ask them to fix their BIOS.  The problem is 
> that they claim that the Host-PCI bridge in their system only decodes 
> addresses 0xa0000-0xbffff (i.e. the VGA window) via the "Producer" resources 
> in the _CRS method of the Host-PCI bridge device.  This tells the OS
> that all
> the existing PCI devices are using invalid memory address ranges but that 
> there is also no available address space to allocate for PCI devices such as 
> em0.
> 
> You can workaround this by setting "debug.acpi.disabled=hostres" until 
> VirtualBox fixes their code.  I'm happy to provide further
> clarification to an
> existing VirtaulBox bug report if needed.

Thanks a lot for the analysis! I've talked to one of the virtualbox
developers about that but they are not aware of such problems with Linux
or Windows guests yet. So they are currently unsure if it's a VirtualBox
or FreeBSD fault and if it's their fault why it works fine with other
guests. I'm also unsure because I haven't heard of that problem before
and now multiple people complain. That looks more like a FreeBSD related
problem on current or stable.

I think it would be good if someone could try to reproduce that with
emulators/virtualbox-ose-legacy which is 3.2.12 to get some vbox dev
look into the problem again.

-- 
Bernhard Froehlich
http://www.bluelife.at/