VirtualBox 4.1.20 Failed to start guest (gcc-4.7 problem)

[victor]

After upgrading the kernel and Virtualbox, it may not run a guest VM

[victor]

dmesg output

[victor]

VBox.log

[Frank Mehnert]

Which Linux kernel version is that exactly? Did you build it yourself or are you using some distro package?

[victor]

my .config

[victor]

Replying to frank:

Which Linux kernel version is that exactly? Did you build it yourself or are you using some distro package?

Linux kernel version 3.5.0, self-assembled the .config file is attached.

[Frank Mehnert]

Are you using gcc-4.7? We saw some reports that VBox modules compiled with this compiler don't properly work.

[victor]

Yes, gcc-4.7.1

[victor]

When can we expect to improve the situation of compile your modules with gcc-4.7?

[Frank Mehnert]

The modules compile fine here with gcc-4.7. I still think this is a bug in the compiler you are using. So far I was not able to reproduce the problem locally.

[victor]

GCC rehabilitated. The fault is not in it: System module assembly does not verify that the required kernel configuration options are included - particularly PAE.

[Frank Mehnert]

I don't understand, can you explain that a bit more in detail? And, btw, I've seen modules provided by a user compiled with gcc-4.7.something which indeed contained invalid code.

[victor]

All the same MB, compiler, virtualbox. Changed only support memory size in kernel from 4G to 64G and miraculously it worked.

cat .config

# CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is not set
CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G = y
CONFIG_VMSPLIT_3G = y
# CONFIG_VMSPLIT_2G is not set
# CONFIG_VMSPLIT_1G is not set
CONFIG_PAGE_OFFSET = 0xC0000000
CONFIG_HIGHMEM = y
CONFIG_X86_PAE = y
CONFIG_ARCH_PHYS_ADDR_T_64BIT = y
CONFIG_ARCH_DMA_ADDR_T_64BIT = y
CONFIG_NEED_NODE_MEMMAP_SIZE = y
CONFIG_ARCH_FLATMEM_ENABLE = y
CONFIG_ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE = y
CONFIG_ARCH_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL = y
CONFIG_ILLEGAL_POINTER_VALUE = 0
CONFIG_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL = y
# CONFIG_FLATMEM_MANUAL is not set
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_MANUAL = y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM = y
CONFIG_HAVE_MEMORY_PRESENT = y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_STATIC = y
CONFIG_HAVE_MEMBLOCK = y

I can not say exactly when did this dependence, because not used every version of VirtualBox. Blame the GCC4.7 or not - is not explored.

Offtopic:

By the way the latest version VBox 4.2 is fine with this kernel, whereas with the old configuration even installation bills fail.

[Frank Mehnert]

Could you attach both vboxdrv.ko modules, once compiled for a kernel with 4G memory limit, the other for a kernel with 64G memory limit? Thank you!