Error in suplibOsInit - Kernel driver not installed

[lowracer]

I've been using Virtualbox for years, just upgraded to a new machine and upgraded the OS to Ubuntu 12.04. Got daily system freezes with this new OS so I upgraded to kernel 3.4. This seems to have fixed the daily crashes but now Virtualbox won't run any virtual machines. I just can not get a virtual machine started. It tells me that the Kernel driver is not installed (rc=-1908) and instructs me to run /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup. When I try that I get very soon to a black screen filled with white text, looks like this might be a kernel panic? I've tried a number of different ways to get this to work, all have failed resulting in that black screen of death. Any suggestions would be appreciated as I'm unable to run Windows 7 now in a virtual machine, part of the reason I upgraded to the new machine and OS.

I have completely de-installed and purged virtualbox in my attempts to get this to work so I do not have a VBox.log file. I currently can not install the program without blackscreen so I am unable to generate a VBox.log file at this time. I am on Linux but I do not have a core file but I was able to take a photograph of the black screen, which I will attach.

[lowracer]

screenshot of black screen of death

[vasily Levchenko]

Could you please attach config file of you kernel and dmesg?

[Frank Mehnert]

Where do you have the kernel 3.4 kernel packages from? I've seen many annoying problems with packages from Ubuntu ppa archives, see this ticket and your error description sounds similar.

[lowracer]

dmesg

[lowracer]

I have attached the dmesg. Not sure what config file is being requested, can you give me a suggestion for the location and filename?

I got the kernel 3.4 from ​http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.4-precise/

[Frank Mehnert]

As I said, we already had very bad experiences from users using these kernel packages, for instance see #10384. These packages normally have the problem that the headers don't exactly fit the kernel package. And your provided dmesg log also shows a problem so I guess the kernel package you are using is broken as well.

[lowracer]

Thanks for the quick response. So is there a suggested workaround? Go back to stock Ubuntu 12.04 and just deal with the daily system freezes or get a 3.4 kernel from some other source?

[Frank Mehnert]

First, don't use the packages from the kernel ppa. Let's focus on your 'system freeze'. How can you trigger it and are you sure that it is related to VirtualBox at all?

[lowracer]

The system freeze is independent of Virtualbox. There is a bug report about it in launchpad (​https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/993187). Stock Ubuntu 12.04 64bit, Intel ivy bridge CPU. It seems to happen either while scrolling or resizing a window. Generally seems to happen about once a day. Complete system lock-up, no mouse movement, no keyboard, no ALT-F1 etc. to get to another command line. This bug in launchpad is where I got the idea to upgrade the kernel (to 3.3.6 originally, which also gave the Virtualbox crashes as I have described, and then I decided to go to 3.4 to see if that would fix the virtualbox crashes, which it didn't.)

[Frank Mehnert]

Then I fear I cannot help you. You could try to build a kernel from the sources yourself or perhaps you find another kernel package. The packages from kernel-ppa are most likely broken.