can't modprobe vboxadd (v1.6.2)

darose · Post by **darose** » 10. Jun 2008, 20:08

We're having a problem on Arch Linux.

We've recently rebuilt our virtualbox packages to upgrade them to v1.6.2. As Arch currently uses gcc 4.3, and virtualbox doesn't yet support that, we've had to adjust our build scripts to build against gcc3.4.

That generally seemed to work out fine. I can modprobe vboxdrv, run the new virtualbox, etc.

However, the guest additions don't seem to be working right. Specifically, I'm not able to modprobe the guest addition vboxadd module. As indicated in our bug report (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10607), this results in the following message:

FATAL: Error inserting vboxadd (/lib/modules/2.6.25-ARCH/misc/vboxadd.ko): Invalid module format

And dmesg shows the following:

No module found in object

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? I've even tried rebuilding the module from scratch, and it still doesn't work, which is even more puzzling: how could a module built on my box against my box' kernel wind up being in an invalid format?!?!?!?

Any suggestions appreciated!

michael · Post by **michael** » 16. Jun 2008, 13:27

The guest additions kernel modules should be built on the guest, using the setup which was used to build the guest kernel (including the same GCC version.

darose · Post by **darose** » 16. Jun 2008, 13:49

michael wrote:The guest additions kernel modules should be built on the guest, using the setup which was used to build the guest kernel (including the same GCC version.

Irrelevant in this case - both guest and host are the same distro and the same version (Arch Linux). So there's definitely something else responsible.

michael · Post by **michael** » 16. Jun 2008, 13:53

Not irrelevant if you are e.g. building the kernel modules with GCC 3.4 and your kernel was built with GCC 4.3. I discussed this with bash on irc.freenode.de/#vbox.

darose · Post by **darose** » 17. Jun 2008, 06:27

michael wrote:Not irrelevant if you are e.g. building the kernel modules with GCC 3.4 and your kernel was built with GCC 4.3. I discussed this with bash on irc.freenode.de/#vbox.

OK, fair enough.

That said, though, I just took your suggestion, and tried doing the build on the guest machine. Same result - invalid module format.

Ideas?

Thanks,

DR

michael · Post by **michael** » 17. Jun 2008, 11:36

Do the PUEL version Additions build on your ArchLinux guest? If so, you can take a look at what is being done there. You can extract them by running

Code: Select all

sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run --keep --noexec

and the file "install.sh" in the extracted file set is the actual installer.

darose · Post by **darose** » 17. Jun 2008, 21:00

michael wrote:Do the PUEL version Additions build on your ArchLinux guest? If so, you can take a look at what is being done there. You can extract them by running
Code: Select all
sh VBoxLinuxAdditions.run --keep --noexec
and the file "install.sh" in the extracted file set is the actual installer.

Hmmm ... worked. I'm looking at functional guest additions as we speak.

Which I guess leaves 2 possibilities:

1) OSE version of the additions has a bug (i.e., maybe it doesn't compile properly against an ultra-recent kernel/gcc/glibc like Arch has)

2) Arch's build script for the OSE module is broken

I'll try to see if I can figure out which of the two is the case. That said, if you've got any additional ideas what might be going on, please do share.

Thanks!