socratis wrote:
Of course! Absolutely! That's the whole idea! The ExtPack needs admin and root access, because it gets installed in "/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/ExtenstionPacks" and by default this is an area that needs authorization to write to. That's how I've been installing the ExtPack since ... forever?
I've never had to use sudo. Using the GUI or VBoxManage will pop a dialog asking you to authenticate... but that might only work if you're in the sudoers group.
The problem was no matter how I did it, GUI or command line, it would prompt to authenticate and then give a VERR_ACCESS_DENIED reading the extpack. This is after allowing access to the Downloads folder. If I ran the GUI or VBoxManage sudo, it would install but wasn't visible when vbox was run without sudo, and I couldn't see an obvious reason why. I dtraced it and it looks like VirtualBox can't access the files added to the app. UNIX permissions are correct but there's some additional layer in Catalina that blocks it. GIving VirtualBox "Full Disk Access" makes no difference.
So, thinking Catalina might be flagging files in Downloads as unsafe, I uninstalled the extpack and moved the extpack out of downloads to my home dir.
Now it installs by prompting for auth at the usual time, and vbox can see the extension pack without being run sudo.
The files installed to VirtualBox.app don't appear to be any different but I bet the APFS metadata is different.
tl;dr: move the Extension Pack out of Downloads before you try to install it. Catalina is somehow restricting files installed directly from Downloads.