virtualbox.org

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.

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...

mrcrispin wrote: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.

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.

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.

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.