Autostarting Virtualbox VMs on Mac host
Posted: 13. Jun 2014, 14:59
I recently finished building a number of Linux guest VMs on a Mac host and wanted them to autostart at boot without needing a user login or interaction. There are a number of articles on how to do this on the web but I found a couple of issues (and solutions) which I felt would be helpful to share here.
Firstly a general overview on how one does auto starting of VMs on a Mac.
This is easily fixed by changing the line
to
The second problem I found and probably the more serious one, is that all the example launchdaemon plist files I saw assume that the /Applications/Virtualbox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxAutostartDarwin.sh script needs two parameters, these being 'start' and the file path to a configuration file. This is wrong at least in VirtualBox 4.3.12 r93733 and I suspect several previous versions as well.
If you look at the bottom of the /Applications/Virtualbox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxAutostartDarwin.sh script, then you will see the following lines
The CONFIG=${1} line means that the first parameter is the file path to the configuration file, the second line vboxStartStopAllUserVms "start" means it is hard-coded to start and does not need start passing to it as a parameter. Unfortunately all the example launchdaemon files have been written to pass it two parameters like so
script start /file/path/configfile.cfg
With these example launchdaemons having the start command as the first parameter it means the script is not getting a valid file path (because the file path is then in the second parameter) and this means it fails, launchd then keeps trying to run it again and you will get respawn messages in your system.log
So the solution to this is not to pass start as a parameter in your launchdaemon file, this will mean the command just becomes
script /file/path/configfile.cfg
A corrected launchdaemon file is listed below
Firstly a general overview on how one does auto starting of VMs on a Mac.
- Write a launchdaemon plist file
Write a config file to list which user accounts are allowed to run VMs
Enable the desired VMs in those account(s)
Enable the launchdaemon
Reboot
Test
This is easily fixed by changing the line
Code: Select all
|| "${USERSHELL}" == "/usr/bin/false" || "${USERSHELL}" == "/dev/null" || "${USERSHELL}" == "/usr/sbin/uucico" ]]
Code: Select all
|| "${USERSHELL}" == "/bin/false" || "${USERSHELL}" == "/usr/bin/false" || "${USERSHELL}" == "/dev/null" || "${USERSHELL}" == "/usr/sbin/uucico" ]]
If you look at the bottom of the /Applications/Virtualbox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxAutostartDarwin.sh script, then you will see the following lines
Code: Select all
CONFIG=${1}
vboxStartStopAllUserVms "start"
trap vboxStopAllUserVms HUP KILL TERMscript start /file/path/configfile.cfg
With these example launchdaemons having the start command as the first parameter it means the script is not getting a valid file path (because the file path is then in the second parameter) and this means it fails, launchd then keeps trying to run it again and you will get respawn messages in your system.log
So the solution to this is not to pass start as a parameter in your launchdaemon file, this will mean the command just becomes
script /file/path/configfile.cfg
A corrected launchdaemon file is listed below
Code: Select all
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<true/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>org.virtualbox.vboxautostart</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxAutostartDarwin.sh</string>
<string>/etc/vbox/autostart.cfg</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>
