Arch Linux

k2_8191

Member

Registered: 2012-10-18

Posts: 20

[SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

Hi all,

After upgrading linux and linux-headers package from 4.9.7-1 to 4.10.1-1 (by pacman -Syu) on my Virtualbox VM , the VM won't boot after GRUB prints "Loading initial ramdisk...".
I was able to avoid this issue by downgrading the two packages to 4.9.7-1.
Any ideas for what I should check next? Does anyone have similar experience with 4.10.1-1?

I tried things below with no luck:

• Recreating initramfs image.

• Reinstalling and reconfiguring GRUB.

• Searching the forum and bugtracker of both Arch Linux and Virtualbox for similar problem.

Some info about my environment:

• Using Virtualbox 5.1.16 on macOS Sierra 10.12.3

• Installed virtualbox-guest-dkms-5.1.16-1 and virtualbox-guest-utils-5.1.16-1

Last edited by k2_8191 (2017-03-25 02:22:35)

silent_mastodon

Member

Registered: 2017-03-12

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

Came here looking for similar feedback. My config is underpinned by XenServer however, and not virtualbox. However, the result is almost the same, I get a completely black console window in the XenServer manager, without even the 'Loading initial ramdisk' message (probably because of the nature of the console)

I was able to recover by chrooting into the installation and using `pacman` to install an older kernel from the cache. Thank goodness for the wiki.

Since then, I have confirmed that both XenServer 7.0 and 7.1 seem to display the issue. The linux-4.10.1-1 package itself seems to be the trigger, as I didn't revert any other packages that installed at the same time as the kernel.

Upgraded installs that displayed the issue were running linux 4.8.13-1 and 4.9.11.

Edit:

Just for giggles, I updated a VMware Workstation 12.5.3 VM from 4.9.11-1 to 4.10.1-1 and it seemed to boot normally.

Last edited by silent_mastodon (2017-03-12 14:19:18)

silent_mastodon

Member

Registered: 2017-03-12

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

Follow-up

4.10.2-1 doesn't change the behavior.

I found a grub switch to enable the console-style boot menu so that I could see more of what was going on, and I can see now that my VM does indeed hang with the same messages as k2_8191's does

Loading Linux linux
Loading  initial ramdisk...

I added the debug option to the grub boot command and the process proceeds until it hits the lines

smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5250U CPU @ 1.60GHz (family: 0x6, model: 0x3d, stepping: 0x4)
cpu 0 spinlock event irq 53

There doesn't appear to be a crash or trace for me to upload anywhere.

gcat

Member

Registered: 2017-03-16

Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

I had the same problem. It turned out some VB modules can't be rebuilt. Problem's gone after I updated Virtualbox and VB Guest Addition in VM to the version 5.18.

k2_8191

Member

Registered: 2012-10-18

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

Just a quick update: the combination of linux 4.10.5-1 and Virtualbox 5.1.16 won't boot.
I'll try upgrading Virtualbox to 5.1.18.

k2_8191

Member

Registered: 2012-10-18

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED]Virtualbox VM hangs on boot after upgrading kernel to 4.10.1-1

Another update and it seems I found a solution for me.

Just upgrading to Virtualbox 5.1.18 won't help. I tried reinstalling linux and linux-headers to make DKMS work but no luck.

However silent_mastodon's debug made me wonder something low-level.
This reminded me that I had installed intel-ucode on my VM (because VM see Intel processor).
I tried uninstalling intel-ucode and regenerating grub config, and my VM started working!

@silent_mastodon Have you installed intel-ucode? If so, will your VM boot if you uninstall intel-ucode?