[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Bug#794466: VIrtualBox future in Debian

[Jeremy Bicha]

Sorry for the long post, but it does give a walkthrough of how this is
working now in Stretch…


I installed Debian Stretch today using the January 23 weekly
netinstall image. I installed to a VirtualBox guest (the host is
Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha). The install went well except for two issues.

1. I chose to install the GNOME desktop. tasksel had some kind of
error near the end of downloading packages. Maybe some transient
network error. When I re-ran the task, it suggested I install some
virtualbox-ose-something package. The install completed successfully.

2. When I rebooted after install, gdm did not start and my console was
flickering really bad. Along with the console flickering, I could not
reliably enter my password since keypresses were getting dropped. I
tried booting into recovery mode but since I did not set a root
password (I prefer to use sudo), Debian gave me an error about the
root account being locked and after I pressed Enter as prompted, it
continued a normal boot. After about 5 minutes, the flickering
stopped. I guess this is systemd eagerly retrying a failed service
until it reaches its timeout.

journalctl -xb revealed that gdm ""could not find drm kms device". I
couldn't find anything useful by searching for that message on Google.
I then checked to see whether the VirtualBox guest utils were
installed. They weren't. So I had to enable unstable in my apt
sources, then
sudo apt -t unstable install virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11
sudo reboot

gdm works great now.

Suggestions
=========
3. Something needs to be done about whatever in the installer suggests
installing the virtualbox-ose package. Since I clicked OK, I thought
it *did* install something useful for VirtualBox but I don't think it
did.

4. I have not had the #2 problem with other distros. Ubuntu includes
some minimal VirtualBox-compatible driver as part of its default
kernel. Could Debian do the same so that Debian will actually run on
VirtualBox?

5. As far as the drivers go, if they aren't in a Debian release, then
once someone actually gets Debian running, I guess they'll either just
keep whatever drivers they installed the first time. Or maybe they'll
use VirtualBox's guest additions iso to install the drivers. Neither
way offers automatic update of drivers. I feel this situation is worse
from a security perspective than having a Debian package that is at
least updated on major new Debian releases.

Why can't the Security Team treat VirtualBox like how it's been
treating WebKit1? Still have it in the archives but with a prominent
notice that Debian does not provide security updates.

6. Assuming that VirtualBox won't be in the next stable Debian
release, I guess we need a page like mozilla.debian.net for it?

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha