Reboot after guest additions rebuild?
Posted: 28. Jul 2022, 07:50
Rebuilding the guest additions in a VirtualBox guest running version 6.1.36 (and possibly earlier versions), I see the following
Note the last 2 messages emitted by the build process: It seems to be saying that the Guest Additions are already available for the kernel and do not need to be rebuilt. But the very next message--which was already emitted earlier--admonishes us to restart the VM in order to replace the kernel modules.
At least from a very cursory view, these messages seem to contradict each other, which leads one to question the need to restart the VM for the update to take effect. As a precaution, I always restart a VM after any guest additions update. But I wonder if this might be unnecessary, at least in some cases. If not, could these messages be made clearer to prevent confusion?
Code: Select all
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox 6.1.36 Guest Additions for Linux........
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer
Removing installed version 6.1.36 of VirtualBox Guest Additions...
vboxadd-service.sh: Stopping VirtualBox Guest Addition service.
You may need to restart your guest system to finish removing guest drivers.
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 5.10.0-16-amd64.
VirtualBox Guest Additions: Running kernel modules will not be replaced until
the system is restarted
VirtualBox Guest Additions kernel modules 6.1.36 r152435 are
already available for kernel 5.10.0-16-amd64 and do not require to be rebuilt.
Running kernel modules will not be replaced until the system is restarted
vboxadd-service.sh: Starting VirtualBox Guest Addition service.
At least from a very cursory view, these messages seem to contradict each other, which leads one to question the need to restart the VM for the update to take effect. As a precaution, I always restart a VM after any guest additions update. But I wonder if this might be unnecessary, at least in some cases. If not, could these messages be made clearer to prevent confusion?