virtualbox.org

Linux Mint offered me the choice to upgrade my kernel to 4.10. I said "yes," and can no longer load my VMs with VirtualBox 5.1.12 r112440.

Error message:

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine

Followed by:

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

I ran vboxconfig, got:

vboxdrv.sh: Building VirtualBox kernel modules.
vboxdrv.sh: failed: Look at /var/log/vbox-install.log to find out what went wrong.

and in vbox-install.log, found:

echo >&2 " ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid."; \
echo >&2 " include/generated/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf are missing.";\
echo >&2 " Run 'make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel src to fix it."; \

My search online for what to do with make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel src did not yield promising results. I'm stuck.

If anyone can suggest troubleshooting steps, I'll be grateful. In the meantime, I'll try returning to the earlier kernel.

Please update to the current Virtualbox 5.1.24 from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and try again.

Looks like that did the trick. Thank you, Martin!