virtualbox.org

Yesterday I had the pop-up alert for Ubuntu updates on my 9.04 installation (32 bit) on my AMD Athlon X2 cpu box. I deselected the updates that were not on the critical list and the updates proceeded to install. Upon auto-restart it would not boot due to kernel panic.

Using the GRUB menu I did a recovery and was able to reboot. Then I did apt-get update.

Things looked OK but I went to run my VM using VirtualBox (3.0.2) and it will not start.

The error message said this was due to the VirtualBox kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908) and:

"The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Re-setup the kernel module by executing

'/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup'

as root. Users of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mandriva should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv kernel module if necessary."

I verified that DKMS was already installed, and ran the setup command above. This was not successful.

I have attached the combined vbox-install and make log outputs, but the meat of it is:

In file included from /tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/the-linux-kernel.h:80,
from /tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.c:35:
include/linux/mm.h error: stray ‘\177’ in program
include/linux/mm.h error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘cache_async_readahead’
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vbox.0/r0drv/linux/memobj-r0drv-linux.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vbox.0] Error 2
make: *** [vboxdrv] Error 2

There seems to be some corrupted kernel file text that is preventing restoration, and I am unsure what the minimum measures are to get this fixed.

I suspect that your problem is a mismatch of the kernel that you reverted to and the build and header files you have installed.
Anyway the fix is to edit the menu.lst to boot to the new kernel, or revert the build and header files to the kernel that you are using.

Perryg wrote:I suspect that your problem is a mismatch of the kernel that you reverted to and the build and header files you have installed.
Anyway the fix is to edit the menu.lst to boot to the new kernel, or revert the build and header files to the kernel that you are using.

I'm having the same problem, and the original poster didn't reply to say whether this worked. On my machine it the most recent kernel (2.6.24-24) appears in the boot menu. I also recompiled using /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup and that didn't help. And in any event, I haven't had to do that in a while because dkms is installed, so I'm not sure why it isn't working after the most recent Ubuntu update.

Any more ideas?

I'm running WindowsXP in VBox 2.0.10 on Ubuntu 8.04.