freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 282, Issue 13

[Scott Bennett]

     On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:57:12 +0100 Beat Gaetzi <beat at FreeBSD.org>
wrote:
>Scott Bennett wrote:
>>      For the first time so far, I managed to get emulators/virtualbox to
>> compile and install from ports a few hours ago.  Following the pkg-messages,
>> I attempted to "kldload vboxdrv" or whatever it was called, which resulted
>> in an immediate crash and automatic system reboot. :-(
>
>This is a known problem and documented on the wiki page:
>http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox

     Okay.  I have often had this problem with other loadable kernel modules,
too, so I wasn't particularly surprised.
>
>>      However, I had already added
>> 
>> vboxdrv_load="YES"
>> vboxnetflt_load="YES"
>> 
>> to /boot/loader.conf and so was expecting it to fail, but it didn't.  I even
>> started up VirtualBox and looked at a couple of things, then looked around
>> in it for a few minutes.  Aside from the fact that the help subsystem was
>> MIA, I didn't notice anything untoward.
>>      Except for the recurring console messages, which began during system
>> startup and have continued ever since.  Here's what a few of them look
>> like.
>> 
>> Oct 28 17:00:00 hellas newsyslog[1939]: logfile turned over due to size>100K
>> Oct 28 17:02:03 hellas kernel: VBoxDrvFreeBSDClone: pszName=pts ppDev=0xe84bea14
>> Oct 28 17:02:36 hellas kernel: VBoxDrvFreeBSDClone: pszName=input ppDev=0xe84e2948
>> Oct 28 17:02:36 hellas kernel: VBoxDrvFreeBSDClone: pszName=dsp ppDev=0xe84e2948
>
>Do you have build VirtualBox with debug option?
>
     I apologize for the delay in getting back to you on this.  When I saw
your question, I didn't recall whether I had selected the debug option or not,
and it was several days before I had time to rebuild it and several more until
I rebooted the system.  It turned out that I had indeed selected the debug
option, so I cancelled it on the rebuild.  After rebooting, the messages were
no longer present, even during and after running VirtualBox briefly.
     It's kind of a nuisance that the GUI's help stuff doesn't work.  I'll dig
around on-line to see what sort of documentation may be available.  I haven't
used VirtualBox before, so I need something to read to learn how to work with
it.
     Thanks much for pointing to the debug option as the likely cause of the
messages.  It's good to have them gone. :-)


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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