Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Discussions about using Linux guests in VirtualBox.
Post Reply
IlyaBakhlin
Posts: 2
Joined: 13. May 2019, 21:18

Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Post by IlyaBakhlin »

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:

Code: Select all

administrator@www:~$ sudo /media/cdrom0/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run 
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 6.0.6 Guest Additions for Linux........
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Copying additional installer modules ...
Installing additional modules ...
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Starting.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel 
modules.  This may take a while.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: To build modules for other installed kernels, run
VirtualBox Guest Additions:   /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup <version>
VirtualBox Guest Additions: or
VirtualBox Guest Additions:   /sbin/rcvboxadd quicksetup all
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Building the modules for kernel 3.16.0-8-amd64.

VirtualBox Guest Additions: Look at /var/log/vboxadd-setup.log to find out what 
went wrong
VirtualBox Guest Additions: modprobe vboxsf failed
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.
Attachments
installation.txt
Upgrading and Installation
(17.95 KiB) Downloaded 41 times
IlyaBakhlin
Posts: 2
Joined: 13. May 2019, 21:18

Re: Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Post by IlyaBakhlin »

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.
andyp73
Volunteer
Posts: 1631
Joined: 25. May 2010, 23:48
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Assorted Linux, Windows Server 2012, DOS, Windows 10, BIOS/UEFI emulation

Re: Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Post by andyp73 »

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.
My crystal ball is currently broken. If you want assistance you are going to have to give me all of the necessary information.
Please don't ask me to do your homework for you, I have more than enough of my own things to do.
socratis
Site Moderator
Posts: 27330
Joined: 22. Oct 2010, 11:03
Primary OS: Mac OS X other
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Win(*>98), Linux*, OSX>10.5
Location: Greece

Re: Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Post by socratis »

...
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.
Do NOT send me Personal Messages (PMs) for troubleshooting, they are simply deleted.
Do NOT reply with the "QUOTE" button, please use the "POST REPLY", at the bottom of the form.
If you obfuscate any information requested, I will obfuscate my response. These are virtual UUIDs, not real ones.
surforacle
Posts: 18
Joined: 21. Aug 2014, 21:47

Re: Debian Jessie 8.11.1 and Guest Additions

Post by surforacle »

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.
Post Reply