Have you installed the vm tools on the guest?
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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What's crashing? the Linux host? Virtualbox? the windows guest?
(personally I won't be able to help you, but other people might)
First the VM will freeze. Then my whole computer freezes. Then the VM closes and in the Virtual Box menu it says that Windows 11 aborted.
This sounds exactly like Linux giving the old OOM killer. Reproduce the problem, then look at the output of sudo dmesg. If it shows something like "OOM killed process", then yes, that's the problem.
Do the following:
- Consider giving less memory to the VM
- Ensure you have at least a little swap space configured on Linux
- Consider getting more memory
- Exit other programs on Linux, especially web browsers
On my system (Arch), if I have too much running, the kernel can kill processes based on resource starvation. It's quite possible you're running into a similar limitation. There should be a message in dmesg when this happens.
I would consider creating a swapfile if you have an SSD. There should be countless tutorials for doing it on Ubuntu.
It might mean your windows or Ubuntu install gets sluggish, but even 32GB (less than 10% of a typical storage drive!) of spare swap space can let your active and memory-hogging processes breathe instead of invoking the SystemD-OOM killer. Also, it's essentially free! You'll benefit from more RAM though.
For what it's worth, I think Ubuntu is also fairly aggressive with memory management. I remember complaints that it was a little too hasty to kill user processes under memory-limited scenarios. not sure if that was addressed
Hello,
Others have given good advice on narrowing down the issue. I'll just say that I don't think you'll ever get stability with 8gb for win 11. Ubuntu is going to struggle sometimes with the 4gb left for it too.
I would look into upgrading the ram first. Old laptop ram can be very cheap. I doubled the memory in a laptop for my mom by adding a 16gb stick I got on eBay for $20.
If it has an empty slot just buy an exact copy of the module it has and it will probably work. If both slots are occupied you'll have to do some research to find the correct modules and it might not be worth the money and hassle.
I'm also virtualizing windows with kvm/qemu and my laptop's got 16 G of RAM; I gave the host and the guest 8 GB each and sometimes windows crashes when I'm doing memory intensive stuff on the linux(host) side. (video-rendering, heavy image editing, etc. It once crashed while running a python script with selenium)
The guest is windows 10 and it triples the host memory usage while idle.
Do other VMs work right?
Yeah I have Debian on another VM and it runs with no problems
How do you feel about trying Virtual Machine Manager instead? I really prefer it over virtual box, personally. It uses the KVM virtualization built into the Linux kernel instead of needing a module like vbox. If you want to stick with virtual box for some reason, I would make sure that all the drivers are installed on the windows guest, you should really always do that with a VM.
https://sysguides.com/install-a-windows-11-virtual-machine-on-kvm is a pretty good guide I have followed for VirtManager.
I run win 11 vm with 8 gb ram without any problem. Which host os and which cpu do you use?
I'm on Zorin(Ubuntu) and it's an i5 Intel i believe
Oh. I have zero experience with zorin. Ubuntu should ne no problem but i have zero idea what the common pitfalls in zorin are. i5 usually does the job, assuming its not 13 yrs old or something.