More often than not, a virtualized guest behaves like a physical system. Any problems that a physical machine would encounter, a virtual machine will encounter as well. If, for example, Internet connectivity is lost due to external issues, virtual machines will be affected just as much as physical ones.

If a true VirtualBox problem is encountered, it helps to categorize and isolate the problem first. Here are some of the questions that should be answered before reporting a problem:

For problem determination, it is often important to collect debugging information which can be analyzed by VirtualBox support. This section contains information about what kind of information can be obtained.

Every time VirtualBox starts up a VM, a so-called "release log file" is created containing lots of information about the VM configuration and runtime events. The log file is called VBox.log and resides in the VM log file folder. Typically this will be a directory like this:

$HOME/VirtualBox VMs/{machinename}/Logs

When starting a VM, the configuration file of the last run will be renamed to .1, up to .3. Sometimes when there is a problem, it is useful to have a look at the logs. Also when requesting support for VirtualBox, supplying the corresponding log file is mandatory.

For convenience, for each virtual machine, the VirtualBox main window can show these logs in a window. To access it, select a virtual machine from the list on the left and select "Show logs..." from the "Machine" window.

The release log file (VBox.log) contains a wealth of diagnostic information, such as Host OS type and version, VirtualBox version and build (32-bit or 64-bit), a complete dump of the guest's configuration (CFGM), detailed information about the host CPU type and supported features, whether hardware virtualization is enabled, information about VT-x/AMD-V setup, state transitions (creating, running, paused, stopping, etc.), guest BIOS messages, Guest Additions messages, device-specific log entries and, at the end of execution, final guest state and condensed statistics.

In case of crashes, it is very important to collect crash dumps. This is true for both host and guest crashes. For information about enabling core dumps on Linux, Solaris, and OS X systems, refer to the core dump article on the VirtualBox website.^[38]

You can also use VBoxManage debugvm to create a dump of a complete virtual machine; see the section called “VBoxManage debugvm”.

For network related problems, it is often helpful to capture a trace of network traffic. If the traffic is routed through an adapter on the host, it is possible to use Wireshark or a similar tool to capture the traffic there. However, this often also includes a lot of traffic unrelated to the VM.

VirtualBox provides an ability to capture network traffic only on a specific VM's network adapter. Refer to the network tracing article on the VirtualBox website^[39] for information on enabling this capture. The trace files created by VirtualBox are in .pcap format and can be easily analyzed with Wireshark.

VirtualBox includes a built-in VM debugger, which advanced users may find useful. This debugger allows for examining and, to some extent, controlling the VM state.

The VM debugger is available in all regular production versions of VirtualBox, but it is disabled by default because the average user will have little use for it. There are two ways to access the debugger:

The debugger can be enabled in three ways:

A new 'Debug' menu entry will be added to the VirtualBox application. This menu allows the user to open the debugger console.

The VM debugger command syntax is loosely modeled on Microsoft and IBM debuggers used on DOS, OS/2 and Windows. Users familiar with symdeb, CodeView, or the OS/2 kernel debugger will find the VirtualBox VM debugger familiar.

The most important command is help. This will print brief usage help for all debugger commands. The set of commands supported by the VM debugger changes frequently and the help command is always up-to-date.

A brief summary of frequently used commands follows:

See the built-in help for other available commands.

The VM debugger supports symbolic debugging, although symbols for guest code are often not available. For Solaris guests, the detect command automatically determines the guest OS version and locates kernel symbols in guest's memory. Symbolic debugging is then available. For Linux guests, the detect commands also determines the guest OS version, but there are no symbols in the guest's memory. Kernel symbols are available in the file /proc/kallsyms on Linux guests. This file must be copied to the host, for example using scp. The loadmap debugger command can be used to make the symbol information available to the VM debugger. Note that the kallsyms file contains the symbols for the currently loaded modules; if the guest's configuration changes, the symbols will change as well and must be updated.

For all guests, a simple way to verify that the correct symbols are loaded is the k command. The guest is normally idling and it should be clear from the symbolic information that the guest operating system's idle loop is being executed.

Another group of debugger commands is the set of info commands. Running info help provides complete usage information. The information commands provide ad-hoc data pertinent to various emulated devices and aspects of the VMM. There is no general guideline for using the info commands, the right command to use depends entirely on the problem being investigated. Some of the info commands are:

The output of the info commands generally requires in-depth knowledge of the emulated device and/or VirtualBox VMM internals. However, when used properly, the information provided can be invaluable.

VirtualBox uses the 64-bit ELF format for its VM core files created by VBoxManage debugvm; see the section called “VBoxManage debugvm”. The VM core file contain the memory and CPU dumps of the VM and can be useful for debugging your guest OS. The 64-bit ELF object format specficiation can be obtained here: http://downloads.openwatcom.org/ftp/devel/docs/elf-64-gen.pdf.

The overall layout of the VM core format is as follows:

[ ELF 64 Header]
[ Program Header, type PT_NOTE ]
  -> offset to COREDESCRIPTOR
[ Program Header, type PT_LOAD ] - one for each contiguous physical memory range
  -> Memory offset of range
  -> File offset
[ Note Header, type NT_VBOXCORE ]
[ COREDESCRIPTOR ]
  -> Magic
  -> VM core file version
  -> VBox version
  -> Number of vCPUs etc.
[ Note Header, type NT_VBOXCPU ] - one for each vCPU
[ vCPU 1 Note Header ]
  [ CPUMCTX - vCPU 1 dump ]
[ Additional Notes + Data ] - currently unused
[ Memory dump ]

The memory descriptors contain physical addresses relative to the guest and not virtual addresses. Regions of memory such as MMIO regions are not included in the core file.

The relevant data structures and definitions can be found in the VirtualBox sources under the following header files: include/VBox/dbgfcorefmt.h, include/VBox/cpumctx.h and src/VBox/Runtime/include/internal/ldrELFCommon.h.

The VM core file can be inspected using elfdump and GNU readelf or other similar utilities.

Occasionally, some host file systems provide very poor writing performance and as a consequence cause the guest to time out IDE/SATA commands. This is normal behavior and should normally cause no real problems, as the guest should repeat commands that have timed out. However some guests (e.g. some Linux versions) have severe problems if a write to an image file takes longer than about 15 seconds. Some file systems however require more than a minute to complete a single write, if the host cache contains a large amount of data that needs to be written.

The symptom for this problem is that the guest can no longer access its files during large write or copying operations, usually leading to an immediate hang of the guest.

In order to work around this problem (the true fix is to use a faster file system that doesn't exhibit such unacceptable write performance), it is possible to flush the image file after a certain amount of data has been written. This interval is normally infinite, but can be configured individually for each disk of a VM.

For IDE disks use the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
      "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#[x]/Config/FlushInterval" [b]

For SATA disks use the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
      "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/FlushInterval" [b]

The value [x] that selects the disk for IDE is 0 for the master device on the first channel, 1 for the slave device on the first channel, 2 for the master device on the second channel or 3 for the master device on the second channel. For SATA use values between 0 and 29. Only disks support this configuration option; it must not be set for CD/DVD drives.

The unit of the interval [b] is the number of bytes written since the last flush. The value for it must be selected so that the occasional long write delays do not occur. Since the proper flush interval depends on the performance of the host and the host filesystem, finding the optimal value that makes the problem disappear requires some experimentation. Values between 1000000 and 10000000 (1 to 10 megabytes) are a good starting point. Decreasing the interval both decreases the probability of the problem and the write performance of the guest. Setting the value unnecessarily low will cost performance without providing any benefits. An interval of 1 will cause a flush for each write operation and should solve the problem in any case, but has a severe write performance penalty.

Providing a value of 0 for [b] is treated as an infinite flush interval, effectively disabling this workaround. Removing the extra data key by specifying no value for [b] has the same effect.

If desired, the virtual disk images can be flushed when the guest issues the IDE FLUSH CACHE command. Normally these requests are ignored for improved performance. The parameters below are only accepted for disk drives. They must not be set for DVD drives.

To enable flushing for IDE disks, issue the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

The value [x] that selects the disk is 0 for the master device on the first channel, 1 for the slave device on the first channel, 2 for the master device on the second channel or 3 for the master device on the second channel.

To enable flushing for SATA disks, issue the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush" 0

The value [x] that selects the disk can be a value between 0 and 29.

Note that this doesn't affect the flushes performed according to the configuration described in . Restoring the default of ignoring flush commands is possible by setting the value to 1 or by removing the key.

On some hardware platforms and operating systems, virtualization peformance is negatively affected by host CPU power management. The symptoms may be choppy audio in the guest or erratic guest clock behavior.

Some of the problems may be caused by firmware and/or host operating system bugs. Therefore, updating the firmware and applying operating systems fixes is recommended.

For optimal virtualization performance, the C1E power state support in the system's BIOS should be disabled, if such a setting is available (not all systems support the C1E power state). Disabling other power management settings may also improve performance. However, a balance between performance and power consumption must always be considered.

To use 2D Video Acceleration within VirtualBox, your host's video card should support certain OpenGL extensions. On startup, VirtualBox checks for those extensions, and, if the test fails, this option is silently grayed out.

To find out why it has failed, you can manually execute the following command:

VBoxTestOGL --log "log_file_name" --test 2D

It will list the required OpenGL extensions one by one and will show you which one failed the test. This usually means that you are running an outdated or misconfigured OpenGL driver on your host. It can also mean that your video chip is lacking required functionality.

Changing certain virtual machine settings can cause Windows guests to fail during start up with a bluescreen. This may happen if you change VM settings after installing Windows, or if you copy a disk image with an already installed Windows to a newly created VM which has settings that differ from the original machine.

This applies in particular to the following settings:

If a VM is configured to have more than one processor (symmetrical multiprocessing, SMP), some configurations of Windows guests crash with an 0x101 error message, indicating a timeout for inter-processor interrupts (IPIs). These interrupts synchronize memory management between processors.

According to Microsoft, this is due to a race condition in Windows. A hotfix is available.^[40] If this does not help, please reduce the number of virtual processors to 1.

When installing Windows 2000 guests, you might run into one of the following issues:

These problems are all caused by a bug in the hard disk driver of Windows 2000. After issuing a hard disk request, there is a race condition in the Windows driver code which leads to corruption if the operation completes too fast, i.e. the hardware interrupt from the IDE controller arrives too soon. With physical hardware, there is a guaranteed delay in most systems so the problem is usually hidden there (however it should be possible to reproduce it on physical hardware as well). In a virtual environment, it is possible for the operation to be done immediately (especially on very fast systems with multiple CPUs) and the interrupt is signaled sooner than on a physical system. The solution is to introduce an artificial delay before delivering such interrupts. This delay can be configured for a VM using the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/Devices/piix3ide/0/Config/IRQDelay" 1

This sets the delay to one millisecond. In case this doesn't help, increase it to a value between 1 and 5 milliseconds. Please note that this slows down disk performance. After installation, you should be able to remove the key (or set it to 0).

When Windows guests run into a kernel crash, they display the infamous bluescreen. Depending on how Windows is configured, the information will remain on the screen until the machine is restarted or it will reboot automatically. During installation, Windows is usually configured to reboot automatically. With automatic reboots, there is no chance to record the bluescreen information which might be important for problem determination.

VirtualBox provides a method of halting a guest when it wants to perform a reset. In order to enable this feature, issue the following command:

VBoxManage setextradata "VM name" "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1

With Windows Vista, Microsoft dropped support for the AMD PCNet card that VirtualBox used to provide as the default virtual network card before version 1.6.0. For Windows Vista guests, VirtualBox now uses an Intel E1000 card by default.

If, for some reason, you still want to use the AMD card, VirtualBox ships a 32-bit driver for that card with the Windows Guest Additions; see the section called “Windows Vista networking”.

Several background applications of Windows guests, especially virus scanners, are known to increases the CPU load notably even if the guest appears to be idle. We recommend to deactivate virus scanners within virtualized guests if possible.

The performance for accesses to shared folders from a Windows guest might be decreased due to delays during the resolution of the VirtualBox shared folders name service. To fix these delays, add the following entries to the file \windows\system32\drivers\etc\lmhosts of the Windows guest:

255.255.255.255        VBOXSVR #PRE
255.255.255.255        VBOXSRV #PRE

After doing this change, a reboot of the guest is required.

Some Linux guests may cause a high CPU load even if the guest system appears to be idle. This can be caused by a high timer frequency of the guest kernel. Some Linux distributions, for example Fedora, ship a Linux kernel configured for a timer frequency of 1000Hz. We recommend to recompile the guest kernel and to select a timer frequency of 100Hz.

Linux kernels shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as of release 4.7 and 5.1 as well as kernels of related Linux distributions (for instance CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux) support a kernel parameter divider=N. Hence, such kernels support a lower timer frequency without recompilation. We suggest to add the kernel parameter divider=10 to select a guest kernel timer frequency of 100Hz.

Most Linux-based guests will fail with AMD Phenoms or Barcelona-level Opterons due to a bug in the Linux kernel. Enable the I/O-APIC to work around the problem (see the section called “System settings”).

The following bugs in Linux kernels prevent them from executing correctly in VirtualBox, causing VM boot crashes:

Guest desktop services in guests running the X11 window system (Solaris, Linux and others) are provided by a guest service called VBoxClient, which runs under the ID of the user who started the desktop session and is automatically started using the following command lines

VBoxClient --clipboard
VBoxClient --display
VBoxClient --seamless

when your X11 user session is started if you are using a common desktop environment (Gnome, KDE and others). If a particular desktop service is not working correctly, it is worth checking whether the process which should provide it is running.

The VBoxClient processes create files in the user's home directory with names of the form .vboxclient-*.pid when they are running in order to prevent a given service from being started twice. It can happen due to misconfiguration that these files are created owned by root and not deleted when the services are stopped, which will prevent them from being started in future sessions. If the services cannot be started, you may wish to check whether these files still exist.

VirtualBox makes use of the Microsoft Component Object Model (COM) for inter- and intra-process communication. This allows VirtualBox to share a common configuration among different virtual machine processes and provide several user interface options based on a common architecture. All global status information and configuration is maintained by the process VBoxSVC.exe, which is an out-of-process COM server. Whenever a VirtualBox process is started, it requests access to the COM server and Windows automatically starts the process. Note that it should never be started by the end user.

When the last process disconnects from the COM server, it will terminate itself after some seconds. The VirtualBox configuration (XML files) is maintained and owned by the COM server and the files are locked whenever the server runs.

In some cases - such as when a virtual machine is terminated unexpectedly - the COM server will not notice that the client is disconnected and stay active for a longer period (10 minutes or so) keeping the configuration files locked. In other rare cases the COM server might experience an internal error and subsequently other processes fail to initialize it. In these situations, it is recommended to use the Windows task manager to kill the process VBoxSVC.exe.

In case you have assigned a physical CD/DVD drive to a guest and the guest does not notice when the medium changes, make sure that the Windows media change notification (MCN) feature is not turned off. This is represented by the following key in the Windows registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom\Autorun

Certain applications may disable this key against Microsoft's advice. If it is set to 0, change it to 1 and reboot your system. VirtualBox relies on Windows notifying it of media changes.

If connecting to a Virtual Machine via the Microsoft RDP client (called Remote Desktop Connection), there can be large delays between input (moving the mouse over a menu is the most obvious situation) and output. This is because this RDP client collects input for a certain time before sending it to the RDP server.

The interval can be decreased by setting a Windows registry key to smaller values than the default of 100. The key does not exist initially and must be of type DWORD. The unit for its values is milliseconds. Values around 20 are suitable for low-bandwidth connections between the RDP client and server. Values around 4 can be used for a gigabit Ethernet connection. Generally values below 10 achieve a performance that is very close to that of the local input devices and screen of the host on which the Virtual Machine is running.

Depending whether the setting should be changed for an individual user or for the system, either

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Min Send Interval

or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Min Send Interval

can be set appropriately.

Deadlocks can occur on a Windows host when attempting to access an iSCSI target running in a guest virtual machine with an iSCSI initiator (e.g. Microsoft iSCSI Initiator) that is running on the host. This is caused by a flaw in the Windows cache manager component, and causes sluggish host system response for several minutes, followed by a "Delayed Write Failed" error message in the system tray or in a separate message window. The guest is blocked during that period and may show error messages or become unstable.

Setting the environment variable VBOX_DISABLE_HOST_DISK_CACHE to 1 will enable a workaround for this problem until Microsoft addresses the issue. For example, open a command prompt window and start VirtualBox like this:

set VBOX_DISABLE_HOST_DISK_CACHE=1
VirtualBox

While this will decrease guest disk performance (especially writes), it does not affect the performance of other applications running on the host.

If no bridged adapters show up in the "Networking" section of the VM settings, this typically means that the bridged networking driver was not installed properly on your host. This could be due to the following reasons:

If host-only adapter cannot be created (either via the Manager or VBoxManage), then the INF cache is probably corrupt. In this case, the install log (%windir%\inf\setupapi.log on XP or %windir%\inf\setupapi.dev.log on Vista or later) would typically mention the failure to find a suitable driver package for the sun_VBoxNetAdp component. Again, as with the bridged networking problem described above, the solution is to uninstall VirtualBox, remove the INF cache (%windir%\inf\INFCACHE.1), reboot and try to re-install VirtualBox.

If the VirtualBox kernel module (vboxdrv) refuses to load, i.e. you get an "Error inserting vboxdrv: Invalid argument", check (as root) the output of the dmesg command to find out why the load failed. Most probably the kernel disagrees with the version of the gcc used to compile the module. Make sure that you use the same compiler as used to build the kernel.

If you have configured a virtual machine to use the host's CD/DVD drive, but this does not appear to work, make sure that the current user has permission to access the corresponding Linux device file (/dev/hdc or /dev/scd0 or /dev/cdrom or similar). On most distributions, the user must be added to a corresponding group (usually called cdrom or cdrw).

On older Linux distributions, if your CD/DVD device has a different name, VirtualBox may be unable to find it. On older Linux hosts, VirtualBox performs the following steps to locate your CD/DVD drives:

In other words, you can try to set VBOX_CDROM to contain a list of your CD/DVD devices, separated by colons, for example as follows:

export VBOX_CDROM='/dev/cdrom0:/dev/cdrom1'

On modern Linux distributions, VirtualBox uses the hardware abstraction layer (hal) to locate CD and DVD hardware.

The previous instructions (for CD and DVD drives) apply accordingly to floppy disks, except that on older distributions VirtualBox tests for /dev/fd* devices by default, and this can be overridden with the VBOX_FLOPPY environment variable.

If the experimental CD/DVD writer support is enabled with an incorrect VirtualBox, host or guest configuration, it is possible that any attempt to access the CD/DVD writer fails and simply results in guest kernel error messages (for Linux guests) or application error messages (for Windows guests). VirtualBox performs the usual consistency checks when a VM is powered up (in particular it aborts with an error message if the device for the CD/DVD writer is not writable by the user starting the VM), but it cannot detect all misconfigurations. The necessary host and guest OS configuration is not specific for VirtualBox, but a few frequent problems are listed here which occurred in connection with VirtualBox.

Special care must be taken to use the correct device. The configured host CD/DVD device file name (in most cases /dev/cdrom) must point to the device that allows writing to the CD/DVD unit. For CD/DVD writer units connected to a SCSI controller or to a IDE controller that interfaces to the Linux SCSI subsystem (common for some SATA controllers), this must refer to the SCSI device node (e.g. /dev/scd0). Even for IDE CD/DVD writer units this must refer to the appropriate SCSI CD-ROM device node (e.g. /dev/scd0) if the ide-scsi kernel module is loaded. This module is required for CD/DVD writer support with all Linux 2.4 kernels and some early 2.6 kernels. Many Linux distributions load this module whenever a CD/DVD writer is detected in the system, even if the kernel would support CD/DVD writers without the module. VirtualBox supports the use of IDE device files (e.g. /dev/hdc), provided the kernel supports this and the ide-scsi module is not loaded.

Similar rules (except that within the guest the CD/DVD writer is always an IDE device) apply to the guest configuration. Since this setup is very common, it is likely that the default configuration of the guest works as expected.

On Linux, VirtualBox makes use of a custom version of Mozilla XPCOM (cross platform component object model) for inter- and intra-process communication (IPC). The process VBoxSVC serves as a communication hub between different VirtualBox processes and maintains the global configuration, i.e. the XML database. When starting a VirtualBox component, the processes VBoxSVC and VirtualBoxXPCOMIPCD are started automatically. They are only accessible from the user account they are running under. VBoxSVC owns the VirtualBox configuration database which normally resides in ~/.VirtualBox. While it is running, the configuration files are locked. Communication between the various VirtualBox components and VBoxSVC is performed through a local domain socket residing in /tmp/.vbox-<username>-ipc. In case there are communication problems (i.e. a VirtualBox application cannot communicate with VBoxSVC), terminate the daemons and remove the local domain socket directory.

If USB is not working on your Linux host, make sure that the current user is a member of the vboxusers group. On older hosts, you need to make sure that the user has permission to access the USB filesystem (usbfs), which VirtualBox relies on to retrieve valid information about your host's USB devices. The rest of this section only applies to those older systems.

As usbfs is a virtual filesystem, a chmod on /proc/bus/usb has no effect. The permissions for usbfs can therefore only be changed by editing the /etc/fstab file.

For example, most Linux distributions have a user group called usb or similar, of which the current user must be a member. To give all users of that group access to usbfs, make sure the following line is present:

# 85 is the USB group
none     /proc/bus/usb     usbfs      devgid=85,devmode=664    0    0

Replace 85 with the group ID that matches your system (search /etc/group for "usb" or similar). Alternatively, if you don't mind the security hole, give all users access to USB by changing "664" to "666".

The various distributions are very creative from which script the usbfs filesystem is mounted. Sometimes the command is hidden in unexpected places. For SuSE 10.0 the mount command is part of the udev configuration file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules. As this distribution has no user group called usb, you may e.g. use the vboxusers group which was created by the VirtualBox installer. Since group numbers are allocated dynamically, the following example uses 85 as a placeholder. Modify the line containing (a linebreak has been inserted to improve readability)

DEVPATH="/module/usbcore", ACTION=="add",
    RUN+="/bin/mount -t usbfs usbfs /proc/bus/usb"

and add the necessary options (make sure that everything is in a single line):

DEVPATH="/module/usbcore", ACTION=="add",
    RUN+="/bin/mount -t usbfs usbfs /proc/bus/usb -o devgid=85,devmode=664"

Debian Etch has the mount command in /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh. Since that distribution has no group usb, it is also the easiest solution to allow all members of the group vboxusers to access the USB subsystem. Modify the line

domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev

so that it contains

domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=85,devmode=664

As usual, replace the 85 with the actual group number which should get access to USB devices.

Other distributions do similar operations in scripts stored in the /etc/init.d directory.

Linux kernels including the grsec patch (see http://www.grsecurity.net/) and derivates have to disable PAX_MPROTECT for the VBox binaries to be able to start a VM. The reason is that VBox has to create executable code on anonymous memory.

When running a large number of VMs with a lot of RAM on a Linux system (say 20 VMs with 1GB of RAM each), additional VMs might fail to start with a kernel error saying that the vmalloc pool is exhausted and should be extended. The error message also tells you to specify vmalloc=256MB in your kernel parameter list. If adding this parameter to your GRUB or LILO configuration makes the kernel fail to boot (with a weird error message such as "failed to mount the root partition"), then you have probably run into a memory conflict of your kernel and initial RAM disk. This can be solved by adding the following parameter to your GRUB configuration:

uppermem 524288

The ZFS file system is known to use all available RAM as cache if the default system settings are not changed. This may lead to a heavy fragmentation of the host memory preventing VirtualBox VMs from being started. We recommend to limit the ZFS cache by adding a line

set zfs:zfs_arc_max = xxxx

to /etc/system where xxxx bytes is the amount of memory usable for the ZFS cache.

32-bit Solaris 10 hosts (bug 1225025) require swap space equal to, or greater than the host's physical memory size. For example, 8 GB physical memory would require at least 8 GB swap. This can be configured during a Solaris 10 install by choosing a 'custom install' and changing the default partitions.

For existing Solaris 10 installs, an additional swap image needs to be mounted and used as swap. Hence if you have 1 GB swap and 8 GB of physical memory, you require to add 7 GB more swap. This can be done as follows:

For ZFS (as root user):

zfs create -V 8gb /_<ZFS volume>_/swap
swap -a /dev/zvol/dsk/_<ZFS volume>_/swap

To mount if after reboot, add the following line to /etc/vfstab:

/dev/zvol/dsk/_<ZFS volume>_/swap - - swap - no -

Alternatively, you could grow the existing swap using:

zfs set volsize=8G rpool/swap

And reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

For UFS (as root user):

mkfile 7g /path/to/swapfile.img
swap -a /path/to/swapfile.img

To mount it after reboot, add the following line to /etc/vfstab:

/path/to/swap.img - - swap - no -