[solved] Vbox 5.1.14 doesn't start anymore on Fedora 25

[Martin]

Today I tried to start a VM in my Fedora 25 Vbox 5.1.14 installation and got the error message

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Kernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)
The VirtualBox Linux kernel driver (vboxdrv) is either not loaded or there is a permission problem with /dev/vboxdrv. Please reinstall the kernel module by executing
'/sbin/vboxconfig'
as root.
where: suplibOsInit what: 3 VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (-1908) - The support driver is not installed. On linux, open returned ENOENT.

The last successful start was two weeks ago.

Running vboxconfig as root creates the following output:

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# /sbin/vboxconfig
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxdrv.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxdrv.service.
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxballoonctrl-service.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxballoonctrl-service.service.
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxautostart-service.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxautostart-service.service.
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxweb-service.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxweb-service.service.
vboxdrv.sh: Building VirtualBox kernel modules.
vboxdrv.sh: Starting VirtualBox services.
vboxdrv.sh: Building VirtualBox kernel modules.
vboxdrv.sh: failed: modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why.

There were problems setting up VirtualBox.  To re-start the set-up process, run
  /sbin/vboxconfig
as root.

There is no entry of anything Vbox related in dmesg.

# uname -a
Linux mdtiny.local 4.9.5-200.fc25.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 20 12:24:16 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

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# dnf list installed kernel-*
Failed to synchronize cache for repo 'infinality-ultimate-noarch', disabling.
Failed to synchronize cache for repo 'infinality-ultimate', disabling.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:17:07 ago on Fri Jan 27 12:52:19 2017.
Installed Packages
kernel-core.x86_64                                                  4.9.3-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-core.x86_64                                                  4.9.4-201.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-core.x86_64                                                  4.9.5-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-devel.x86_64                                                 4.9.3-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-devel.x86_64                                                 4.9.4-201.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-devel.x86_64                                                 4.9.5-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-headers.x86_64                                               4.9.5-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules.x86_64                                               4.9.3-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules.x86_64                                               4.9.4-201.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules.x86_64                                               4.9.5-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules-extra.x86_64                                         4.9.3-200.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules-extra.x86_64                                         4.9.4-201.fc25                                          @updates
kernel-modules-extra.x86_64                                         4.9.5-200.fc25                                          @updates

I'm attaching the vbox-install.log

[Perryg]

What was changed between the last time it worked and now? Did you do a kernel update/upgrade?

[Martin]

There were one or two kernel updates in between, but everything just from the official repositories.

[Perryg]

Can you test if falling back to an earlier kernel allow the VBox modules to load? I suspect the newer kernel may require something that it does not see. I don't do fedora a lot but can you also look in syslog and kernel log for any error messages?

[Martin]

I'll reboot to an older kernel later today.
The kernel message log only shows the output lines of vboxconfig.

[Martin]

I found the error in a completely different place:
I remembered that I didn't check the BIOS settings when I switched the harddisk to a new but pretty similar box yesterday.
(I really didn't think anymore about the hardware switch when I started this thread... )
I still had secure boot enabled, but the messages didn't show anything related to that.
After disabling secure boot everything just started working again without needing to reconfigure.

[Perryg]

Ah so that would be one of the things that changed between the time it worked and when it failed.

Glad you found it my friend. AFAIK Fedora is one of the few that fails with secure boot, but as I said I don't use it a lot. I build my own Debian type from source.

[Martin]

I think I saw a thread about module signimg in Ubuntu, which should be a similar case.
But I don't really care about secure boot...

[Perryg]

Ah yes I see it now https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11577

It seems that fedora and others require a signed key when using secure boot and VirtualBox can not use the OS key to sign these file which requires the user to create their own key with tools provided by the OS distro. Interesting! I don't use secure boot and hosts new enough to care about it.