xoristzatziki's suggestion of backporting VirtualBox 5.2.6 to 16.04 LTS is what I think needs to happen here.
Following Alkis Georgopoulos's advice, I can confirm that 5.2.6 works great on the 4.13 kernel To install it, I ran all of this as one command: sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian xenial contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list' ; wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt- key add ; sudo apt remove virtualbox ; sudo apt update ; sudo apt install virtualbox-5.2 -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1736116 Title: Host with kernel 4.13 freezes when starting a VM with VirtualBox To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/virtualbox/+bug/1736116/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs