[vbox-dev] Unable to start VBox

[Frank Mehnert]

Hi John,

On Dienstag, 9. Mai 2017 06:11:44 CEST John Frankish wrote:
> > > After compiling VirtualBox-5.1.22 for linux, I am unable to start it.
> > >
> > > I'd be grateful for any suggestions on how to fix this.
> > >
> > > ----------
> > > snip
> > >
> > are you able to start VirtualBox as root? I assume you will experience the
> > same problem as when running as regular user. In that case please run
> > strace again and provide the (compressed) log file of strace.
> > 
> No, I'm not able to start virtual box with sudo, but I noticed that I only
> got the i965/swrast message when I started with sudo.
> 
> Note that /usr/local/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox is suid root.
> 
> Since "Virtualbox" and "sudo VirtualBox" produces different output I attached
> both strace logs.

to be honest I'm not 100% sure where the problem is. To me it seems like
VirtualBox wants to open

  /usr/local/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so

which is actually a symlink to

  /tmp/tcloop/Xorg-7.7-3d/usr/local/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so

Now I don't know the exact permissions of all parts of that /tmp/tcloop etc
path. We only accept files for dlopen which have the proper permissions
(owned by root, not writable by any other user, also not the directory).
/tmp might be a special case, a file placed in /tmp owned by root should
be reasonable safe to open but we might reject it.

You should try two things: First, try the latest patch from

  https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16693

(apply it against the 5.1.22 sources) and try again. If it still doesn't
work, try to place swrast_dri.so to a different directory where all parts
of the path name are owned by root and have 0755 permissions.

Kind regards,

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