VirtualBox network settings causes FreeBSD instant reboot

I've never reported bugs on FreeBSD, or know how or where to do it. I thought I would first post here to get some feedback and if others can confirm the issue.

Summary
I've accidentally managed to cause FreeBSD to instantly reboot when I start a VirtualBox session. I can reproduce this on demand. No error messages are displayed (to the console or X11). The screen just goes black, and the whole computer does a hard reboot. This is pretty harsh, and not something I would expect to be normal.

Details
Three days ago I had to move my workstation (FreeBSD 10.1 64-bit running on x86_64 hardware) temporarily. There was no cabled network, so I enabled WiFi for the first time. I have a built-in Atheros AR9485 wireless network adaptor at ath0. The initial interface is ath0, but when I configured the network to connect to my access point, it created a new interface called wlan0 which has the actual IP address assigned. Network and internet access worked perfectly.

I then needed to run a 32-bit FreeBSD 9.0 server in VirtualBox (v4.3.20). I switched the bridged network settings from em0 (wired network interface) to ath0 (wireless interface). I started the VM, and everything looked fine, until the VM wanted to bring up its network. My workstation when blank, and the computer did a hard reboot! This happened a couple of times, until I realise I selected the wrong wireless interface for the VM. I switched it from ath0 to wlan0 and my VM started up without problems, and no more hard reboots of my workstation.

Now I am pretty sure a instant hard reboot is not what is expected in such a case, or why it happens. Surely some error message would be better. I haven't tried duplicating the issue with another VM yet, but don't mind creating a new FreeBSD base install VM and trying again - if it helps confirming this bug.

Anybody else experience this before?

ps:
Where do I report this bug? Would in be a FreeBSD base system bug, ports bug etc?

Regards,
Graeme
 
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/ would be the place to report the bug. It sounds like the machine does a kernel panic from whatever VirtualBox is doing. It's probably too soon to tell if this is a base or ports issue.

Lets start with some basic info.
1. Does dmesg happen to show anything from the prior startup on this system? Depending on the hardware, that may show the backtrace from a kernel panic if it is still in the kernel message buffer when the system reboots.
2. Does the system have a swap partition? If so, ensure /etc/rc.conf contains the line below. That will provide valuable information for the bug report.
Code:
dumpdev="AUTO"
 
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