VirtualBox 5.0.16 Guest Additions fail to install under RHEL 5.11 64-bit

[Daniel U. Thibault]

The build fails, and the RHEL 5.11 system becomes unusable: it keeps getting a kernel panic ("not syncing") at boot time.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

Log of the failed install

[Frank Mehnert]

Please attach the corresponding VBox.log file of that VM session.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

VBox.log of the failure

[Frank Mehnert]

You run your EL 5.11 guest with 512MB RAM. Please increase the amount of guest RAM to 640MB. Do you still have this issue after doing that? If so, any chance to get a guest log which contains such a kernel panic? Configuring a serial port which outputs to a host file might help.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

What do you mean, 512 MiB? I had the VM configured to run with 1536 MiB! I'll try to figure this out.

Confirmed, when running (before the Guest Additions installation attempt), the system monitor reports 1.3 GiB of user memory. What gave you the impression the VM was running with only 512 MiB?

[Frank Mehnert]

Sorry, my fault. 1536 MiB should be really sufficient. But still, a guest log containing the kernel panic would be helpful.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

I paused the VM as it panicked and got a snapshot of that.

[Daniel U. Thibault]

Screenshot of kernel panic

[Daniel U. Thibault]

VBox.log of kernel panic

[Frank Mehnert]

Unfortunately the actual kernel panic is not visible (only the callstack is). According to the hex code it's indeed a normal kernel panic. When do it happen? Does it also happen if you don't have the vboxsf module loaded (and no shared folders shared)?

[Daniel U. Thibault]

Replying to frank:

Unfortunately the actual kernel panic is not visible (only the callstack is). According to the hex code it's indeed a normal kernel panic. When does it happen? Does it also happen if you don't have the vboxsf module loaded (and no shared folders shared)?

It never makes it that far. While the system is rebooted, as it starts up it goes into a kernel panic and loops back to booting again. Sometimes it even panics as it is going down. (Normally I must then restore the VM to its pre-Guest-Additions state) You can experience this yourself by grabbing a RHEL 5.11 64-bit installation DVD and building a fresh system, then inserting the Guest Additions and running VBoxLinuxAdditions.run. Since RHEL is not freely accessible, I should try this with CentOS 5.11 and see if the same thing happens.

Note that RHEL 5.11 32-bit has no problem with the Guest Additions.