Kernel driver not loaded?

[Lizzie]

I have been successfully running VB on Fedora 22 for several months. I upgraded to Fedora 23 with VB still working. Yesterday, I updated to Fedora 4.2.7-300.fc23.x86_64. I am now receiving the following error:

The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem witih /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing '/sbin/vboxconfig' as root. if is is available in your distribution, you should install the DKMS package first. This package keeps track of Linux kernel changes and recompiles the vboxdrv module if necessary. where: suplibOsinit what: 3 VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (-1908) - The support driver is not installed. On linux, open returned ENOENT.

tried executing /sbin/vboxconfig, no errors returned but also did not seem to resolve the problem.

any suggestions?

Lizzie

[socratis]

You failed to mention the exact VBox version that you're running, but 5.0.12 that came out almost at the same time as your post, may contain a fix. Check it out...

[Lizzie]

Problem solved with the installation of VB 5.0.12. Thanks!!

[tsakerjr]

Lizzie, the updated version may have solved your problem for now, but I suspect you'll encounter the same problem after Fedora gives out a subsequent kernel update and VB doesn't have an update to run. I have a Ubuntu host and updated the kernel. When starting up a VM in VB 5.0.10, I got the same error message. Running the recommended command in a terminal resulted in some kind of error and no fix. When this happened in any VB v. 4, the recommended Ubuntu command to run in order to recompile VB is /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. Running this command resulted in successful running of VMs. Ha ha, just got notified of another Linux kernel update as I'm writing this. I'll run the update, see what happens with VB, and post results if anyone's interested.

[loukingjr]

@tsakerjr Install DKMS and the matching headers for the new kernel in your guests and you won't have that problem.

[socratis]

@loukingjr: I'm not familiar with the Linux kernel updates, but if the distros are doing a "major" upgrade, then DKMS will fail sometimes, won't it? Like in ticket #14866? That's actually what I had in mind when I proposed the 5.0.12 update to Lizzie. I saw it in the changelog and I thought that it might apply.

[loukingjr]

I posted what I did because tsakerjr mentioned he just updated his kernel. Without matching headers the guest additions won't build and without DKMS they won't build on their own. You have to build them manually.

What you told Lizzie was correct. It was more than just a kernel update. Fedora 23 had other changes.

Linux is nice that way. You don't always know what will work until it fails. What I do then is ask Perry how to fix it.

[tsakerjr]

Well, I did the kernel update and VB refused to run a VM. I ran the vboxdrv setup command and it worked fine. I installed dkms and the next kernel update will tell if that works.

[loukingjr]

If you have build-essentials installed in your guest the header files should be added automatically. Unless of course you are installing kernels outside of your Ubuntu version. For example installing the 4.3 kernel in Ubuntu 14.04. The headers for a 4.3 kernel wouldn't be in the 14.04 repos.

[Lizzie]

@tsakerjr Install DKMS and the matching headers for the new kernel in your guests and you won't have that problem.

New kernal loaded so of course Satuday's fix no longer applies. dkms-2.2.0.3-31.git.7c is installed and I made sure that I installed the headers when I installed the kernal. I had to then go back and install the matching kernel-devel and kernel-debug-devel packages so that dkms would work properly.

Lizzie

[loukingjr]

Lizzie, I only run Fedora guests and anytime there was a kernel update, so far anyway, kernel-devel was updated as well. I don't know what happens with Fedora hosts and I'm not adventurous enough to install new kernels that aren't part of a standard update.

[Lizzie]

Same problem new verse

I am now running Fedora 23 using the kernel package 4.3.3-301.fc23. I have installed the matching kernel-headers, kernel-devel, and kernel-debug-devel. dkms 2.2.0.3-31.git.7c is also installed.

I downloaded and installed virtualbox-5.0-5.0.14_105127_fedora22-1 and Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-5.0.14-105127.vbox-extpack from Virtualbox.org

Getting the Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908) error message when I attempt to start a Win 8.1 session.

When I attempt to run sudo /sbin/rcvboxdvr setup, it returns the message that setup is a bad argument.

Any suggestions?