VirtualBox freezes on startup => Gentoo problem (VBoxSysInfo.sh missing)

[Jerome Poulin]

VirtualBox freezes on startup for 2 to 6 startups until it finally starts. I've got to kill it with xkill or killall and restart it before the GUI shows up correctly, else I only see a gray square. I will attach a strace and core dump file of the frozen state.

And the strace gets blocked at waitpid and won't move at all, even after 15 minutes.

[Jerome Poulin]

strace log

[Jerome Poulin]

Autoformatting.. grrr. Also dump file is too big for bug tracker, so here you go: 949kb ​http://ticpu.net:8080/~jerome/VirtualBox/core.15496.lzma 1587kb ​http://ticpu.net:8080/~jerome/VirtualBox/core.15496.bz2 Just in case I'm not alone using lzma compressor :)

[Switching to Thread 0xb7d196d0 (LWP 15496)]
0xffffe424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0xffffe424 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1  0xb7f7b12b in waitpid () from /lib/libpthread.so.0
#2  0xb781c6d3 in VBoxGlobal::platformInfo () from /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.so
#3  0xb78b8c26 in VBoxUpdateDlg::search () from /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.so
#4  0xb78215a0 in VBoxGlobal::showUpdateDialog () from /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.so
#5  0xb78058cb in TrustedMain () from /opt/VirtualBox/VirtualBox.so
#6  0x080496c9 in ?? ()
#7  0x08048d7b in ?? ()
#8  0xb7d635fe in __libc_start_main () from /lib/libc.so.6
#9  0x08048c71 in ?? ()

[Frank Mehnert]

I assume you installed the 32-bit Linux generic package?

Please disable your update checker. The waitpid system call is waiting for the wrong process ID. This shouldn't happen of course.

[Jerome Poulin]

I installed it with the Gentoo package manager but the Update check was indeed checked. I'll run it unchecked and see if I get the problem again, makes sense, once it ran, it was running fine for the rest of the day and update check was once a day :)

[Frank Mehnert]

Please could you repeat the strace session, this time with adding the -f parameter? Make sure to call the update checker once. Please attach the output of strace to this ticket once more. Thank you!

[Jerome Poulin]

strace -f log backsearch for waitpid shows that connection times out

[Frank Mehnert]

Ok, the reason for the freeze on Gentoo systems is that the Gentoo package installer removes the /opt/VirtualBox/VBoxSysInfo.sh script for some unknown reason. Is there any chance to ask the Gentoo maintainers to not do that or, if they insist on removing that script, at least providing a dummy script?

[Jerome Poulin]

Makes sense, the ebuild which I used to install the application does a remove on the file, I'll make sure this gets fixed downstream. Thanks for your time! ​http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=266939