VirtualBox

Opened 8 years ago

Last modified 6 years ago

#15526 closed defect

Guest additions newer than 5.0.16 cause X to fail in Ubuntu 15 and 16 — at Version 17

Reported by: raynebc Owned by:
Component: guest additions/x11/graphics Version: VirtualBox 5.0.22
Keywords: Cc:
Guest type: other Host type: other

Description (last modified by Michael Thayer)

As reported on the forum a couple times, most recently here: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=364318#p364318

In that thread, Michael indicated Oracle can no longer can reproduce the wide spread problems where the newer versions of the guest additions (newer than 5.0.16) caused the video interface to not launch in some versions of Linux, so he asked me to open this ticket.

(Edit (Michael): I am not aware of these "wide spread problems" at all, let alone able to reproduce them.)

My host OS is Windows 7 Pro x64 and the affected guest OSs are Ubuntu 15.x and 16.04 LTS. Originally I just grabbed the generic Ubuntu 15.10 VM image from osboxes.org and installed some various packages mostly just related to building a cross-platform application that I program for. The Ubuntu 16 VM was created by making a clone of the Ubuntu 15 VM within the Virtualbox manager and allowing the OS to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.

I will attach two sets of logs. One of them is a normal boot and shutdown while the version 5.0.16 guest additions are installed. The other set reflects the botched boot up when the 5.0.22 guest additions are installed and me manually opening a virtual terminal to issue the shutdown command.

Change History (21)

by raynebc, 8 years ago

Successful boot and shutdown with version 5.0.16 additions

by raynebc, 8 years ago

Malfunctioning boot while 5.0.22 additions are installed and shutdown via virtual terminal.

comment:1 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Could you try to reproduce this using a fresh installation from Ubuntu installation media and without performing an upgrade after installation? If that fails, please try to find the most minimal reproduction scenario you can, as what you wrote above is still rather involved.

comment:2 by cowbutt, 8 years ago

A CentOS 7 guest on Windows 8.1 behaves similarly with both 5.0.16 and 5.0.22. The Guest Additions have been broken in various ways since 5.0.18 for me.

in reply to:  2 comment:3 by Frank Mehnert, 8 years ago

Replying to cowbutt:

A CentOS 7 guest on Windows 8.1 behaves similarly with both 5.0.16 and 5.0.22. The Guest Additions have been broken in various ways since 5.0.18 for me.

Sorry, but this information does not help at all. For me the Guest Additions of 5.0.18 / 5.0.20 and 5.0.22 work well with CentOS 7. So please enumerate and describe exactly what doesn't work for you.

comment:4 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Please, for issues like this provide us with the simplest possible reproduction scenario using a freshly installed guest system.

comment:5 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Component: otherguest additions/x11/graphics

comment:6 by raynebc, 8 years ago

Here are more simplified steps to reproduce the problem:

Download the x64 Ubuntu Wily VDI offered here: http://www.osboxes.org/ubuntu/

Register a new VM with that existing hard drive image, allow it automatically detect the type as Linux and the version as 64 bit Ubuntu. Set the base memory to 2048MB. Max out the video memory to 128 MB and enable 3D acceleration. Boot the new guest, insert the 5.0.22 guest additions ISO via the Devices VirtualBox menu and allow the guest to run and install them. Reboot the guest and the x11 problem is immediately observed. It's not a clean install, but it's a starting point and should at least be relatively easy to allow developers to reproduce the problem.

comment:7 by raynebc, 8 years ago

Another finding: Disabling the 3D acceleration on the above example VM allows the GUI to work.

comment:8 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Tested it with current development code on a Linux host, but with official 5.0.22 Additions. So far I can't see any problems. I wonder if it is related to your Windows host graphics drivers. Did you actually try to reproduce this with a freshly installed machine?

comment:9 by raynebc, 8 years ago

As requested, I tested with a fresh guest OS (Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 LTS x64).

VM setup: New VM, 2GB RAM, new VHD (VDI format, dynamic, 8GB), 128MB VRAM, 3D acceleration enabled. All other VM settings left to default configuration.

Guest OS setup: Did not enable the option to automatically install any updates during installation of the OS. Default partitioning options and language options for my region (US-English).

On the first boot after installation completed, it hung with a message saying that said to either upgrade the BIOS or to use some sort of boot option. After rebooting the VM, everything came up normally and I logged in. I installed the guest 5.0.22 additions and rebooted and once again x11 failed to start up. I found that it would briefly display a message (that I assume is the same as the one it did that first reboot after the installation of the guest OS) and then display a blank screen. I managed to screen capture the message, which says:

/dev/sda1: recovering journal
/dev/sda1: clean, 187102/393216 files, 1000629/1572608 blocks
[    6.512902] piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr
[    6.930460] intel_rapl: no valid rapl domains found in package 0

I'm not sure that output is very meaningful, because I see that it is displayed even before the GUI successfully starts up during boot (ie. whenever 5.0.22 guest additions are not installed).

Forcefully rebooting the VM led to the same behavior so I got to a virtual terminal and ran the guest additions uninstall script and rebooted. After this, the guest OS booted normally, GUI and all. So I installed the guest additions again by inserting the ISO via the VirtualBox devices menu and opting to install it when the prompt came up automatically. After a reboot, the GUI failed to load as usual. I shut the VM off and disabled 3D acceleration, and after this change, the VM could boot with GUI. Re-enabling 3D acceleration again prevents the GUI from working as I expected.

The old guest additions (5.0.16) work just fine if I install them in this new VM. For this reason I tend to think that it's not a problem with my system or Radeon's drivers, but that guest additions lost compatibility with some system configurations after 5.0.16.

Last edited 8 years ago by raynebc (previous) (diff)

comment:10 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Could you upload /var/log/Xorg.0.log from the guest immediately after X.Org has failed to start? The guest's dmesg output might also be useful.

by raynebc, 8 years ago

Xorg.0.log and dmesg output after X11 fails to start

comment:11 by raynebc, 8 years ago

I have attached the requested logging.

comment:12 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

It would be great if you could also look for any lightdm, Unity or Compiz logs on the system, as I see nothing unusual in those logs, except that the X server terminates immediately for no visible reason. Perhaps trying to start lightdm from the command line (sudo systemctl start lightdm) might give more information. By the way, is the console in normal text mode (25 lines) or graphical mode (definitely more than 25 lines)? I think we will need more back and forwards to work out what is happening here, so any investigation of your own would be very helpful too.

comment:13 by raynebc, 8 years ago

I have no significant expertise with Linux, as I have mostly just been a Windows user most of my life. I don't know how to troubleshoot this type of problem and as such I am unfortunately only capable of providing information that I am specifically guided to collect.

When this problem occurs, virtual terminal 7 (the one used by x11) appears to be in text mode as there is a blinking cursor at the top left most character position of the screen. Based on the size of the cursor, it appears the display is configured to be 25 characters tall. The screen is otherwise entirely black, no keyboard input is reflected on screen if I type anything and no mouse pointer is displayed. I have to change to another virtual terminal to perform any command (such as copying the xorg log and dmesg output to another file I can retrieve later).

When I change to another virtual terminal to issue your suggested command to start lightdm, that terminal's console output blanks out with a blinking cursor at the top left of the screen exactly as terminal 7 behaves. It remains this way until I change to another virtual terminal and back, at which point it is back to normal and shows that I had issued the "sudo systemctl start lightdm" command. Changing to terminal 7 shows that x11 is still not functional.

by raynebc, 8 years ago

Attachment: lightdmlogs.zip added

lightdm logs as of when x11 has failed to start

comment:14 by raynebc, 8 years ago

I was eventually able to find and access the lightdm logs, which have been attached.

comment:15 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Still no success at reproducing this. Is there any way that you could make a virtual machine affected by this problem (the .vbox and the .vdi files) available for me to download?

comment:16 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Took a look at your lightdm logs again. In x-0-greeter.log I see repeated: "Failed to launch bus: Failed to connect to session bus". That does not look like a VirtualBox-related problem.

What prompted me to look again is that I am also having similar problems with an Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine: if the host system is under load (e.g. compiling) the guest boots fine. If not, it gives me a message that "The system is running in low-graphics mode", but when I look on VT-7 the X server has started without any problems. Symptoms similar to this:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814760

What I am trying to get at: this may be a lightdm problem, perhaps a timing one - lightdm does seem to have timing problems on Ubuntu - which happened to be triggered by the different Additions version. You might look at your system log (execute "journalctl" to see it in Ubuntu 16.04) to see if there is any more information there. And you might want to try asking lightdm people if this might be a bug there. If they try to send you back to us, you could try getting them to talk to us directly.

comment:17 by Michael Thayer, 8 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
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