Abort VBox upgrade if at least one VM is running or paused

[Eric Mangold]

I often used Ctrl-P to toggled the "paused" state of a Windows XP VM (Linux host).

This has always worked great, however today I upgraded to 2.2.2 (r46594).

The next time I tried to unpause the VM (it had been paused for many hours) an error dialog came up "Unable to resume execution..." with the error Callee RC: NS_ERROR_ABORT (0x80004004)

This results in an aborted VM and loss of execution state... not fun :(

OS: Ubuntu 8.10 $ apt-cache policy virtualbox-2.2 virtualbox-2.2:

Installed: 2.2.2-46594_Ubuntu_intrepid

...

I've attached the log for this

[Eric Mangold]

I have a strong hunch that this has something to do with the package upgrade procedure leaving the Virtual Box kernel componenets and/or the userland daemons (VBoxSVC, VBoxXPCOMIPCD) in a bad state.

Immediately after this error occured I closed the Virtual Box GUI, but the process remained and prevented me from launching the GUI again. After killing this process I tried to start the GUI again and still it wouldn't start... the process was running but appeared to be hanging at some point.

A reboot fixed it and pause/resume appears to be working normally, at least the couple of times that I tried it.

[Frank Mehnert]

When did you do the upgrade? Are you 100% sure that no VM was running?

[Eric Mangold]

It's possible that the VM was running when I did the upgrade.. I don't think so but I can't rule it out 100%.

Regardless, if the package can't be upgraded with VirtualBox running then a 'preinst' script ought to detect that an abort with an error.

[Frank Mehnert]

Since VBox 3.0.6 the Linux packages check if there is an active VM and refuse to install.