[vbox-dev] Guest Additions, co-existence of distribution and upstream versions

[Frank Mehnert]

Larry,

On Wednesday 11 November 2015 11:40:07 Larry Finger wrote:
> > following problem: Any pre-installed component of VirtualBox Guest
> > Additions (GA) can conflict with update GA the user intents to install.
> > The user might want to install new GA to have bug fixes or to have new
> > features. The new GA should uninstall all components of the old GA,
> > including the kernel modules. Otherwise the new GA try to use the
> > kernel modules of the old GA which might not work. Btw, on openSUSE
> > it seems to be very important to re-build the initrd after the kernel
> > modules are updated but that's not directly related.
> 
> I am not able to envision a situation where the VB modules are needed before
> the user's main disk partition is mounted r/w, thus I have no idea why it
> would be necessary to re-build initrd. As far as I remember, our packaging
> never puts any VB modules there.

I did not test but I assume that udev runs very early and automatically
loads at least the vboxguest.ko module because this one is suitable for
the VBox guest PCI device. If the module of the old GA is already loaded
then the module of the updated GA will not be loaded.

Kind regards,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
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