virtualbox.org

Hello, world!

I've been trying to install Debian 8.11.1 "Jessie" on a virtual machine, having as host Windows 10, but I've been facing problems with Guest Additions.

What I've done is install and upgrade the mentioned GNU/Linux distribution. The only important thing about the upgrade is that the kernel image's version changed from 3.16.0-6 to 3.16.0-8.

The next step is installing the Guest Additions package, but the resulting process gives the following messages:
As you can see, the modprobe command fails, which turns in the inability to mount shared folders.

Can somebody help me with this problem?

Thank you very much!

Regards.

P. S.: I've attached a text file with all the commands I've executed to install the Guest Additions package.

Hello, world again!

I have updated my VirtualBox to the latest version, which is 6.0.8, and the same error is showing up.

Any advice or help would be nice.

Regards.

VBoxLinuxAdditions.run output wrote:VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what went wrong

Can you zip and post the file that contains the details of the error?

-Andy.

...
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what 
went wrong
VirtualBox Guest Additions: modprobe vboxsf failed

administrator@www:~$ sudo cat /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log   
Could not find the X.Org or XFree86 Window System, skipping.

It seems that you don't have a window server, is it a CLI install?

Regarding the "modprobe vboxsf failed" message:

[color=#AA0000]A key Linux GAs developer[/color] wrote:If "vboxsf" is not loaded when the installer finishes it tries to load it. If there is an old, incompatible version of "vboxguest" loaded but no "vboxsf" then it will try to load "vboxsf" and fail.

I had the same experience yesterday with Jessie 8.11.1 (amd64, 3.16.0-6 kernel) and VB 6.0.6 guest additions (also on a Win 10 x64 host, but that’s not relevant). The /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log file merely said "Installing X.Org Server 1.16 modules" and nothing else.

The problem was a compilation error in vboxguest-6.0.6/vboxsf/regops.c (in the vboxsf kernel module). The log of the error was in the /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log.1 file following the failing guest additions module builds. This bug apparently relates to changes that occurred right around the time of the Linux 3.16.0 kernel release. That file (regops.c) in the VB 6.0.6 release is a hot mess - containing 125+ conditional compilation switches based on the ranges of kernel version numbers, some 20+ of which specifically have a logical boundary at the 3.16.0 kernel release - which is right about where the Jessie distro finished up.

As the compilation fails due to a change in argument list count of a kernel utility function ( "iov_iter_get_pages()" ), I assume that it is a bug in the (kernel-version conditional compilation) guest additions code. (I do not envy the maintainer - did I mention “hot mess”?)

Rather than attempt to fix the (src/vboxguest-6.0.6/vboxsf/regops.c) code I used a different workaround: adding the debian backports for Jessie and installing the 4.9.0 linux kernel and the matching kernel header sources. (linux-image-4.9.0-0.bpo.9-amd64, 4.9.168-1+deb9u4~deb8u1). The guest additions built successfully for that kernel. You can find instructions online for the apt manipulations for Jessie backports (e.g. on stackexchange) - google is your friend.

Note that as this workaround involves using a distro (archive.debian.org) backports server, it will expire (June 2020?)

I was expecting that kernel change might break a bunch of things (in particular the X.org server) but that didn’t seem to happen. As always though - YMMV.

PS @socratis - thank you for your presence & diligence here. You might wonder why folks are doing fresh installs of 5-year old distros; in this case it was driven by a third-party vendor with a linux-only tool that was only certified on a (different) 5-year old distro that doesn't seem to be available online any longer. I tried to get it (that tool) functioning on Debian Stretch but it was a mess (likely race conditions based on non-deterministic fault behavior, java dependencies, etc). Slipping an older version of Debian underneath that tool made it work again... with some effort.