Bug#901778: gnome-shell: blank screen after "OpenGL Warning: vboxCall failed with VBox status code VERR_BUFFER_OVERFLOW" on VirtualBox

[Simon McVittie]

Control: retitle -1 gnome-shell: blank screen after "OpenGL Warning: vboxCall failed with VBox status code VERR_BUFFER_OVERFLOW" on VirtualBox
Control: severity -1 important

On Mon, 18 Jun 2018 at 10:41:33 +0100, Saman Ghannadzadeh wrote:
> Upon login, gnome-shell crashes with the following errors:
> 
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed
> Jun 18 10:22:27 debian gnome-shell[789]: g_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed

Are you sure those are relevant, and are you sure they are the last things
logged? If gnome-shell has crashed, I would expect either a fatal error
message, or a kernel crash-dump log message, followed by a lot of other
processes crashing or otherwise exiting because they lost their Wayland
and/or X11 connections.

> This leaves the user with a blank screen.

Are you sure it crashes? Are you sure it doesn't continue to run, but
fail to render anything?

> lightdm/mate/etc work fine on this system. Please note that this is running inside a Virtualbox VM with the VirtualBox tools installed.

Which version of VirtualBox?

Where did you get the parts of VirtualBox that run inside the VM: from
the Debian package virtualbox-guest-utils, or from a virtual CD image
or similar provided by VirtualBox?

> A detailed log can be found at https://gist.githubusercontent.com/samangh/0d453c0e999f8e5127705f56688d5e02/raw/053fdf4574b486adcc11592cb4324d6896c02a05/gnome-shell-log.txt

I think this is more likely to be the characteristic message from this crash:

Jun 18 10:22:26 debian org.gnome.Shell.desktop[789]: OpenGL Warning: vboxCall failed with VBox status code VERR_BUFFER_OVERFLOW

If GNOME Shell can't render with OpenGL then it isn't going to work.

I've downgraded the severity of this bug from grave to important, because
this version of GNOME Shell does work in general, just not on VirtualBox.

    smcv