Screen resolution of Linux guest (#17790)

[elewis33]

I am having the same symptom on a CentOS 7.5 guest today after doing a system update ("yum update"). Resolution is limited to 1024x768 suddenly. My theory is that something in a recent RHEL update (kernel?) is breaking the GA build. I wouldn't be surprised if it's affecting Oracle Linux as well.

Bingo! I had tossed out my old VM, downloaded the new one from the Oracle site, got it up and running, ran an OS update and the problem reappeared, just as before. Just started from scratch again, so hopefully I'll be able to follow your guidance and get this fixed.

[elewis33]

OK, booted to the original (pre-update) kernel and reinstalled the GAs there, then reboot into that kernel and tried to adjust screen resolution. No go for me. Apparently my kernel version is newer than what you had in your CentOS and that strategy didn't work for me.

Does this kind of thing qualify as a bug, in the VirtualBox stack? It seems like it would, based on the fact that the GAs work fine in an older kernel version, but not the later ones. Just curious. If anyone on the virtualbox team wants some guidance on how to reproduce the results I'm seeing I'd be glad to write up the steps that took me down this rabbit hole.

In any case, I'm going to run my OS/VM without doing an OS update for now. Hopefully it will get fixed in a future version, sometime soon.

[mpack]

Does this kind of thing qualify as a bug, in the VirtualBox stack?

Deciding whether it's a bug or not is not our forte, and in any case it doesn't really matter what we call it. What I'd do is raise a BugTracker ticket, link to the last couple of posts, and let the devs decide if something needs fixing. Speaking as a developer myself (though not on the VirtualBox project) I like it when a problem is as easily reproducable as this seems to be.

[elewis33]

Deciding whether it's a bug or not is not our forte, and in any case it doesn't really matter what we call it. What I'd do is raise a BugTracker ticket, link to the last couple of posts, and let the devs decide if something needs fixing.

Submitted a bug tracker on it. Thanks for the help.

[socratis]

Related ticket information added to the title and the 1st post:
#17790: Screen resolution limited after Linux guest OS update.

[garbage_collected]

Apparently my kernel version is newer than what you had in your CentOS and that strategy didn't work for me.

Thanks for filing the bug report. For what it's worth the known working kernel (3.10.0-693.21.1) was released in early March according to these advisories:

RHEL (3/6): https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:0395
Oracle (3/7): https://linux.oracle.com/errata/ELSA-2018-0395.html
CentOS (3/9): https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/cent ... 22768.html

The next OL7 kernel update after that was in April. We don't know if that one was good or bad, but it's safe to assume OL7 was fine between 3/9 and 4/10 (or 4/16 if following the 3.10 non-UEK kernel series). Maybe you can hunt down a VM image from that timeframe to get by with.

I haven't tested it but apparently kernel updates can be avoided like so:

yum --exclude=kernel* update

[elewis33]

I haven't tested it but apparently kernel updates can be avoided like so:

yum --exclude=kernel* update

FWIW, I just tried running this on a brand new VM of the same flavor that's giving me trouble and it did not appear to work as hoped. Basically, after the update and a reboot I was back in low resolution hell. Suppose I could have done something wrong, but it's a one-liner, right?

[totierne]

Fixed in new Oracle Developer Day VM released yesterday.
There is an issue with sqldeveloper 18.1 on Linux you might have to unzip an earlier version into the VM.
Issue seems to be reduced if you turn off the welcome screen.

Previous cannot resize issue after yum update (Now fixed, a couple of notes here if you want to rescue an existing VM).
Note on login resize set to 800x600 - check xrandr --output '"$result"' --mode 800x600 in /home/oracle/runTimeEnforceMinScreenSize.sh
can xrandr to change size but cannot change size with mouse.

Turloch
-SQLDeveloper & Developer Day VM team

[socratis]

Fixed in new Oracle Developer Day VM released yesterday

Turloch, do you have a link, a version or something more "solid" to download?