[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] 1.6.4

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Hi

On Montag, 18. August 2008, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Sonntag, 17. August 2008, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > On Sonntag, 17. August 2008, Michael Meskes wrote:
> > > On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 04:16:52PM +0200, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> > > > > boot failure usually already happens for me before the framebuffer 
> > > > > initializes, disabling the framebuffer (vga=0) reveals vastly different
> > > > > panics which are also usually cut (don't fit into 80*25 characters). 
> [...]
> > For testing, I've now switched to grub2 (no graphics, simple grub.cfg), no 
> > changes, the most common error message is
> > 	Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
> > 	Booting the kernel
> > 	BUG: unable to handle kernel<1>BUG: unable to handle kernel<1>BUG: unable to h
> > 	[another 20 lines like that]
> > 	andle kernel<1>BUG: unable to handle kernel<1>BUG: unable to handle kernel NUL
> > another one now ending in
> > 	andle kernel<1>BUG: unable to handle kernel<1>BUG: unable to handle kernel pag
> > 	ing request at 00001688
> > The other traces which appear sometimes are just too badly cut at the top.
> > 
> > What is strange though, is that there are no definitive results, while I 
> > wasn't able to boot 2.6.26-1-686 with virtualbox-ose 1.6.4 so far, it just
> > now succeeded once, while a preemptive kernel continues to fail booting (at
> > least with a much higher probability, even that one boots rarely).
> 
> In the mean time I have bisected the issue back to
> 
> http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=e587cadd8f47e202a30712e2906a65a0606d5865
> 
> Once that commit enters the kernel, it crashes as virtualbox-ose guest for
> me. Given that this issue is hard to trigger reliably (it might just boot 
> properly 10 times in a row, but crash the whole day afterwards) and because
> a 2.6.26.3-rc1 with that patch reverted is still compiling and hasn't been 
> tested yet, I'm not claiming that it actually is that commit - yet. 

I've just finished building kernel 2.6.26.3-rc1 with commit 
e587cadd8f47e202a30712e2906a65a0606d5865 reverted and booting it into tty 
as a guest has succeeded in all tests so far, but the guest's X freezes 
shortly after logging into the desktop environment/ window manager (display
manager and tty seem to be stable). So while the mentioned commit is 
definately closely related to the early boot crashes of 2.6.26 guests in 
virtualbox-ose, just reverting it isn't sufficient (this happens with both,
1.6.2-dfsg-1 and 1.6.4-1 (UNRELEASED, see the required change below) and
their corresponding kernel modules, updated in lockstep for host and 
guest).

> Likewise I'm not 100% positive if it's a kernel problem or a bug in 
> virtualbox-ose yet, but given that I'm not sure how much time I have during
> the remaining week, I wanted to report the bisect results early.

Just as a side note
	sed -i s/vbox_dev/gMiscDevice/ ./debian/patches/05-vboxadd-udev.dpatch
is required to build virtualbox-ose-guest-utils-source with virtualbox-ose 
1.6.4-1 (UNRELEASED), cf. svn r11174 of virtualbox upstream svn.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
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