any progress on the gdb regression?

[mrcrispin]

I'm one of the people who got bit by the bug described in http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2977. VirtualBox this morning told me to install the 2.1.2 update, I did, and foolishly agreed to allow it to "upgrade" my VM without a backup (meaning I can't roll back to the old working version...I've been kicking myself over that mistake all day...).

I've already verified that VT-x is enabled, and I went through all the BIOS settings and could not find anything that controlled VT-x there.

The VM in question is a development testbed that's crippled without a working gdb. It's going to cost me a considerable amount of effort to rebuild this VM (which appears to be the only likely alternative), and I'd rather not do it if a fixed VirtualBox is coming soon.

Is there anything else that I can try to get my VM back on the air with a working gdb?

I'm definitely going to be a lot more cautious about installing VirtualBox updates in the future (assuming that I don't end up springing for the Linux version of VMware Workstation like I have on my Mac and Windows boxes). The fact that this bug has been known for three weeks, yet a new release came out just a week ago with it unfixed, scares me. I don't know why I didn't encounter it when 2.1.0 was released, but maybe (I no longer have a way to check) I was running 2.0.6 (which is known to work) and never got auto-notified about the 2.1.0 upgrade.

[mrcrispin]

PS: Other than this, VirtualBox has served me quite well and with far less trouble than VMware has given me over the years. That's probably a factor in why I was so trusting with the update...

[TrevorPH]

It's going to cost me a considerable amount of effort to rebuild this VM (which appears to be the only likely alternative), and I'd rather not do it if a fixed VirtualBox is coming soon.

You will not need to reinstall the guest o/s. You should be able to just install the older VB then set up a new VM definition pointing to the same disk image it used before. It's only the XML for the machine definition that changes, the VDI etc are all the same.

[mrcrispin]

Trevor:

Thanks! I removed that XML file, and was successful in rolling back. I have gdb again, whoo-hoo!

For what it's worth, the "Enable VT-x/AMD-V" box is disabled and greyed out in the Settings in the working version. The new broken version had the box active and enabled.

[csglinux]

I've also rolled back to 2.0.6 and gdb is happy again
I don't think I had a choice here as my XPS M1330 laptop
has no option to enable VT-x support in the BIOS

BTW, what am I missing by downgrading from 2.1.2? The only
difference I noticed with 2.1.2 was that gdb stopped working.

[Sasquatch]

Strange that suddenly VT-x is enabled. Neither my laptop nor my PC supports it (laptop CPU does, but damn motherboard doesn't, damn you Fujitsu-Siemens).

As for what you miss in older versions compared to 2.1.x is the new HIF setup, some other features and some bugfixes. See the changelog for more details of added functionality.