Why does a guest OS of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 — running on VirtualBox v7.1.4 on Windows 11 — often crash on boot?

We noticed this symptom after:

  • Upgrading the physical host from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and…
  • Upgrading VirtualBox from v7.0.x to v7.1.4.
  • We are new to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

We are not sure whether the above changes are relevant to this issue, though.

First, we followed this link and resolved the green turtle icon issue. And we noticed significant speed up after the slowness icon disappears.

However, we still have an instability issue on one of the VMs of RHEL9. More specifically, the VM often crashes on booting with an error message like the sample below. We did not notice the same issue on other guest operating systems.

The crash happens by chance of about 80%. So, we can barely keep working by trying to boot the VM multiple times hoping one time it succeeds.

---------------------------
VirtualBoxVM.exe - Application Error
---------------------------
The instruction at 0x00007FF94FB3FE30 
referenced memory at 0x0000018884ADA001. 
The memory could not be read.


Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program
---------------------------
OK   Cancel   
---------------------------

Screenshot of the error message at booting time