[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Guest additions service while dualbooted as a physical OS (Solaris/OpenIndiana)

[Jim Klimov]

Hello all,

After a long while I've booted into my OpenIndiana installation on my
laptop (which is multibootable, so for a long time I ran it as a VBox VM 
from another OS nearby serving as hypervisor), and noticed that
the initiation of my GDM session complains that the "VirtualBox
service is not running" or something like that. I tracked it to
failure of vboxservice SMF service, which can not run VBoxService
and just spits into the logs an unhelpful error that it could not
find something and so exited.

Then I truss'ed the program and this showed that it can not open
/dev/vboxguest - indeed, while physically booted, this symlink leads
to an absent /devices/... node.

The nit is that the messages could be a bit more informational -
do not die obscurely but say that it could not contact the vboxgest
device, and in that X11 pop-up do imply that this regards the
VirtualBox *Guest Additions* service and not something I should
worry about if I booted this OS as hypervisor itself for now ;)

Also, maybe the vboxservice (SMF) should depend on that device node
which may go missing when booted physically (or upon some other error),
so `svcs -xv` would readily diagnoze the issue.

Now, before I go and post a bug about this - do similar issues pop
up with other dualbooted (phys/virt) OSes?

Thanks,
Jim Klimov