KVM Win10 CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD

Hey everyone,

I am having a crash every few hours in my Win10 KVM (Ubuntu host) that gives the error in a BSOD the following: CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT.

Looking around, it is often referred to something being wrong with the CPU. In the case of KVM, there must be a misconfiguration somewhere.

My CPU is set to copy host CPU configuration, and is set for 1 sockets, 6 cores and 2 threads. (I have a 4930k, so this should be the right setup.)

Anything else that may be going wrong? Thanks.

Probably not a good idea to let the VM use all of the host cores and threads. Try changing the config to use 3 cores/6 threads.

2 Likes

I agree with the above, just use 4 cores and 2 threads instead of 6. Maybe try a few other things like pinning the CPU:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF#CPU_pinning

It might also help to add a hidden state to the VM so win10 doesn't know it's a VM and freak out, you can do this in the same xml as the one you use to pin the cores. Add the following line to the "features" component after "acpi"

As @stenstorp said you need to leave resources for the host to use, leaving threads doesn't really give control to the host, so a good beginning configuration would be splitting the CPU resources in half giving the host and guest 3 cores and 6 threads each, you'll also want to split you memory in half also if your not doing it already.

If this works and your errors/BSDs go away you can try and bump up the number of cores to 4 and 8 threads leaving the host with 2 cores/4 threads, I run a similar setup with a AMD 8370 giving the guest 6 cores leaving 2 for the host and it has worked for well over a year with no issues, starting out on Win 7 (as a guest) and now running Win X.

With that taken care of it may also not be a issue with how you have things setup in vert-manager /QEMU, it may be totally unrelated...

1 Like