FS#58153 - [linux] vboxguest doesn't work in VMs with 4G of RAM or more

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by nl6720 (nl6720) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 09:21 GMT
Last edited by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Thursday, 12 April 2018, 07:27 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Testing
Status Closed
Assigned To Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis)
Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig)
Christian Hesse (eworm)
Christian Rebischke (Shibumi)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:
modprobe can't load the vboxsf module from virtualbox-guest-modules-arch 5.2.8-13 .

# modprobe vboxsf
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'vboxsf': No such device

Additional info:
* package version(s)
* config and/or log files etc.
virtualbox-guest-modules-arch 5.2.8-13
virtualbox-guest-utils 5.2.8-1
linux 4.16-2

Steps to reproduce:
run: modprobe vboxsf
This task depends upon

Closed by  Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis)
Thursday, 12 April 2018, 07:27 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Additional comments about closing:  linux 4.16.1-1 + updated virtualbox packages
Comment by Doug Newgard (Scimmia) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 09:32 GMT
To be clear, you *are* running inside a VirtualBox VM, right?
Comment by nl6720 (nl6720) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 09:37 GMT
Yes, I'm running the command inside a VirtualBox VM.
Comment by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 11:02 GMT
vboxsf loads fine for me, although it's not able to mount a shared folder; will investigate further. If you can't even load the module, you need to check dmesg for more info.

(Mounting error is: vboxsf: Old binary mount data not supported, remove obsolete mount.vboxsf and/or update your VBoxService.)
Comment by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 11:21 GMT
'mount -ct vboxsf <name> <path>' works as long as /usr/bin/mount.vboxsf doesn't exist. Only thing left to figure out is automounting by VBoxService. :)
Comment by nl6720 (nl6720) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 11:46 GMT
I don't get your error and after removing /usr/bin/mount.vboxsf, I get "unknown filesystem type 'vboxsf'".

Attached is my dmesg after running the `modprobe vboxsf` command.
It looks like the "vboxguest: probe of 0000:00:04.0 failed with error -71" could be the problem.
   dmesg.log (33.6 KiB)
Comment by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 12:15 GMT
Yeah, that vboxguest error is suspicious. Maybe it matters that I'm also running 4.16 on the host?
Comment by nl6720 (nl6720) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 12:18 GMT
Maybe.
On the host I have:
linux 4.15.15-1
virtualbox 5.2.8-1
virtualbox-host-modules-arch 5.2.8-11
I don't really want to run [testing] on the host.

Edit:
I enabled [testing] in the host and updated the system, even with linux 4.16-2 & virtualbox-host-modules-arch 5.2.8-13 nothing changed.
Comment by nl6720 (nl6720) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 13:31 GMT
The device, of which the probe fails, is:

0000:00:04.0 System peripheral: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH VirtualBox Guest Service
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap- 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 20
Region 0: I/O ports at c000 [size=32]
Region 1: Memory at e8000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4M]
Region 2: Memory at e8410000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=16K]
Kernel modules: vboxguest

   lspci.log (5 KiB)
Comment by Evangelos Foutras (foutrelis) - Saturday, 07 April 2018, 21:05 GMT
Figured it out: it's a bug in vboxguest that affects VMs with close to 4G of RAM (or more); if you lower the memory allocation to 3G or so, it should work.

See the second and third patches here: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/29/590 -- I'm guessing they will make it into a stable kernel at some point...

Also pushed some new packages to fix vboxservice automounting and to show a message about 'mount -cit' when vboxsf.mount is used: https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-commits/2018-April/477304.html
Comment by nl6720 (nl6720) - Monday, 09 April 2018, 12:43 GMT
By changing the VM's base memory to 3072MB the vboxguest error is gone, everything works. Mounting a shared folder `mount -cit vboxsf NAME /mnt` also works.
Hopefully a package that breaks VirtualBox VMs with more than 4GB RAM will not land in [core].

P.S. Since the issue has been changed to blame the "linux" package, shouldn't the project be changed from "Community Packages" to "Arch Linux"?

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