Linux Guest, Xserver 1.6: video not working

[Sasquatch]

When installing the GA for a Linux Guest, the GUI can't start because of errors in the driver. When checking the Xorg.0.log file from /var/log, there are a lot of errors about hsync not compatible or similar for all modes it tries. Using older GA without issues. See http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15512 for some info.

[DavidG]

I have this same situation with both Mandriva Cooker and Fedora Rawhide. Both are the development branches.

And it is the same in both the x86 and x86_64 versions.

[michael]

Sorry for the slow response time. I am installing myself a Fedora Rawhide VM (actually my second - I messed up the first beyond easy recovery with some bad changes in the Additions kernel driver) and the installation takes forever Sasquatch, I certainly haven't seen anything like you describe in guests that I have used - could you cut and paste relevant bits of the log file, and possibly xorg.conf? Remove noise if necessary... Thanks.

[Sasquatch]

It seems that I'm not allowed to attach text files. Then here are some parts of it. The Xorg.conf file itself is the same as in my howto in Linux Guests.

Code: Select all

[    0.355284] (==) VBoxVideo(0): Depth 24, [    0.355300] (--) framebuffer bpp 32
[    0.355432] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Output VBOX1 using monitor section Configured Monitor
[    0.355483] (II) VBoxVideo(0): The maximum supported resolution is currently 32000x32000
[    0.355509] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Output VBOX1 has no monitor section
[    0.357140] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using built-in mode "1224x701" (unknown reason)
[    0.357174] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "640x350" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357193] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "640x400" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357211] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "720x400" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357228] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "640x480" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357245] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "640x480" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357262] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "640x480" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357279] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "800x600" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357296] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "800x600" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357313] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "800x600" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357330] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "800x600" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357347] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357364] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357381] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357399] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357416] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357432] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1280x960" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357449] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1280x960" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357492] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357509] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357527] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1280x1024" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357544] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357561] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357578] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357595] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357612] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1200" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357629] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1792x1344" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357647] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1792x1344" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357664] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1856x1392" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357681] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1856x1392" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357699] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1920x1440" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357717] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1920x1440" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357752] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "832x624" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357771] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (hsync out of range)
[    0.357788] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.357805] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358066] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358088] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358105] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1152x864" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358122] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1360x768" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358139] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1360x768" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358157] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1400x1050" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358178] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1400x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358195] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1400x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358212] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1400x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358229] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1440x900" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358247] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1600x1024" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358265] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358282] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358299] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358316] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358333] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1680x1050" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358350] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1920x1080" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358367] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1920x1200" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358384] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "1920x1440" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358401] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "2048x1536" (hsync out of range)
[    0.358418] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "2048x1536" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358435] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Not using default mode "2048x1536" (vrefresh out of range)
[    0.358456] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Printing probed modes for output VBOX1
[    0.358499] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Modeline "800x600"x60.3   40.00  800 840 968 1056  600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync (37.9 kHz)
[    0.358629] (II) VBoxVideo(0): Modeline "640x480"x59.9   25.18  640 656 752 800  480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz)

X does start, but it goes to error mode asking for reconfigurting etc. There is no text visible, only buttons.

[michael]

Those messages from the X.Org log are informational only. Note that they start with (II) - errors start with (EE), but are not necessarily fatal. There will probably be an error near the end of the log file.

By the way, the xorg.conf file you pointed me to will only work for versions of X.Org up until (and including) X.Org Server 1.4. Versions 1.5 and 1.6 have a different mouse driver and a different way of handling it - the normal mouse driver (mouse_drv) should be loaded as it usually is, and vboxmouse_drv should be loaded *in addition* - and on X.Org Server 1.5 and 1.6 it should use /dev/vboxadd as a device node. On all distributions that I know except for SUSE though, this is taken care of by the hal daemon, and so xorg.conf does not need any mouse section at all for these distributions.

[michael]

By the way, do you have experience of which distributions your example xorg.conf works with? We are considering changing the current method of configuring the X server to just replace xorg.conf with a standard file (or rather one selected from a number of standard files depending on the distribution we are installing to), so it would be nice to know your experiences.

[Sasquatch]

The one I made is from Ubuntu, so it should work on all Debian based distro's. There are some reports that it worked with others too, but I'm not sure about that. If it worked with others, there is a big chance that it needs a little tweaking.

Btw, there is no error in the log. All those (II) entries are causing X to fail. If no mode is available due to out of sync, there is no way to get it working properly. And the changes you mention about the config of xorg.conf isn't in the manual. In fact, it's nowhere to be found in any documentation there is. Maybe somewhere hidden in the source code, but I'm not a programmer, like a lot of users.
If I don't state a driver, the default VESA driver is used for video, and default mouse is used for the mouse. A reconfigure of xserver-xorg produces a very simple config file, with no video driver and the default mouse driver, not the additions you state.

[snmishra]

I get the following error in the xorg log

...vboxvideo_drv.so: undefined symbol: VBOXDRIScreenInit

Interestingly, that error didn't show up in Ubuntu 8.10

I know I shouldn't be using beta Ubuntu in beta Virtualbox, but I like the bleeding edge

[snmishra]

I untarred the guest additions and looked at the vboxvideo_drv_16.so file. It does indeed have a lot of undefined symbols starting with VBOXDRI. vboxvideo_drv_15.so has none starting with VBOXDRI. Must be a mistake in the build for the 1.6 driver.

[michael]

Hopefully all of these problems should be fixed now in SVN (certainly the undefined VBOXDRI symbols are). Sasquatch, I'm afraid that so far we haven't documented setting up xorg.conf in guests because our script is supposed to work out of the box, and because on the whole it is all standard stuff (the new way of configuring the mouse also uses the standard X.Org mechanisms), not to mention that the X.Org people are working at depricating xorg.conf altogether. The autoconfiguration for X.Org server 1.6-based distributions should now be somewhat better than in the beta.

[Sasquatch]

Ok, I will see how it goes with the new beta that is being uploaded by Frank and also without any xorg.conf settings (no file at all, or empty).

Ok, it works now with beta 2 with the xorg.conf file I always had. No more 640x480 .

[DavidG]

This release solved my problem, same as yours was, also.

[Sasquatch]

I even have Compiz-Fusion running in the VM, with some nice performance. Gotta love it .