results from the first cmsearch VM betatest

[ChristianB]

Thanks to the good support by our helpful Betatester, here are some preliminary results from the cmsearch VirtualBox Betatest last week:

• The good news first: checkpointing is working with the VM, although we may need to find out how to change the frequency of snapshots.
• Automatic deadline extension is also working, although we didn't need it for the Betatest I could see trickle messages coming in on the server.
• On Windows systems the maximum path length of 256 characters is reached due to long tasknames. The client uses the taskname to create the VM in a subfolder of the slot directory using the taskname as folder and filename thus double the character usage. We currently circumvent this by shortening the taskname as much as possible.
• Under some unknown circumstances the vboxwrapper reports the exit status 194 when it can't clean the VM subfolder after the VM shuts down normally. The results are intact and uploaded to the server so I manually mark the result a success. We try to find a better solution.
• Running more than one VM on a host with limited RAM may lead to sluggish behavior for the user. The Client shouldn't start a VM task if not enough RAM is available, this will be investigated with the BOINC developers.
• VirtualBox 4.2.18 has a problem when recovering from a snapshot and the task will fail. This is investigated by BOINC developers as T4T and Climate@home have the same issue. I would encourage all Betatesters to install 4.2.16 if possible or deselect the cmsearch VM app in project preferences.
• Users that have installed BOINC as a Service (Windows only) also have to stop participating in the Betatest or upgrade the BOINC Client to 7.2.11 (unstable developer version) to see if this issue is fixed.
• Credit is granted based on used CPU time of the vboxwrapper not the used CPU time of the VM (that's why it is so low), this is under investigation.
• Lack of RAM is also an ongoing issue as I try to modify the VM to detect a high memory usage by cmsearch that is reported back to the server so we can send the task to a computer with a larger amount of RAM. When this is solved we will lower the 4GB RAM requirement and also provide 32bit VM's.

Most of this will be discussed at the BOINC workshop in Grenoble. The cmsearch VM application will stay Beta but I may convert some production tasks from XXL to VM to test our backend processing.

The remaining cmsearch XXL tasks are phased out gradually. All workunits that don't have at least one successful result will not be resend but wait for conversion to cmsearch VM. The workunits that have a successful result will be resend to computers that have a high "always on" probability.

Thanks again to all Betatesters.