VirtualBox 2.1.0 silently fails guest file opens when VBox process runs out of file descriptors

[Paul]

Performing some large Visual Studio builds on Windows 2003 using a project located in a shared folder was failing with random windows errors about being unable to open specific files. The files named existed and could be opened at a later time with no problems.

On a hunch, I increased the ulimit of file descriptors from 256 to 1024 and restarted the virtual machine. After then I was able to use VStudio without errors. (I was also able to reproduce the error by attempting a Windows command line copy of the project with "xcopy /s <shared-project-location> <local-project-location>")

It would be helpful if when VirtualBox encounters EMFILE errors to log a notice (rate limited if need be) to the log file for the machine to give a hint as to the problem.

[pentagonik]

Thanks for your report and how to solve it. We'll take a look.

[Paul]

This was on a Solaris 10 U6 host.

[Frank Mehnert]

VBox 2.1.4 will show a proper log message in VBox.log.

[aeichner]

Was done long ago, closing.