Boxes crashes on Windows 10 guest sound notifications

…when host sound device is undefined.

Boxes 40.2 on Fedora Rawhide, kernels 5.12-5.14 release candidates, up-to-date (?) Windows 10 vm running Remote Desktop to the office. My last dnf upgrade was 19 July.

I connect to my Windows 10 workstation at the office from my local (home) Windows 10 Boxes guest. After a few headaches when I added a Lenovo USB-C dock to the mix, things have mostly gone swimmingly for months.

Yesterday morning, pop-up notifications on the local or remote Windows machine were sufficient to crash Boxes. The result is the modal dialogue stating “Boxes” is not responding. If I choose Wait, Boxes goes away anyway. When I restart Boxes, the local Windows vm is still running so I pick up where I left off.

This crash is minor compared to those I’ve experienced (infrequently) which require the forced shutdown of the guest or the host, occasionally (but not always) involving an already-running Firefox on the host machine.

I disabled sounds as well as all notifications I could find (the CAD application I use makes use of the system Exclamation! sound) and it seems to have stabilized. When I get a chance to restart, I’ll see if I can diagnose the missing sound device issue. The problem when I started using the Lenovo dock was that I needed to open Settings and switch from dock to the internal audio devices. This week instead of too many devices, there aren’t any.

Hi Michael, sorry for the inconvenience. Could you please share the content of Properties → System → Troubleshooting Logs?

Hi Felipe, no inconvenience, it’s part of running the latest version.

Log sent by email.

Thanks,

Mike

Felipe, once I got pipewire and wireplumber sorted, the issue seems to have gone away. I blame that one restart after ‘dnf upgrade.’

Mike

Thanks for the follow up. I still think this is an issue, since Boxes crashes. I’m having difficulties at reproducing it in my machine, but I will continue trying to fix this.

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