[Solved] Gentoo guest OS in VirtualBox 4.0 doesn't boots

solamour · Last edited by solamour on Mon Jan 03, 2011 6:56 pm; edited 3 times in total

I've been using WinXP as host + VirtualBox 3.x + Gentoo guest OS without problems for quite some time. Then I upgraded VirtualBox to 4.0, and Gentoo stopped booting properly; I see GRUB screen, and a few seconds of kernel messages, but that's it.
http://i897.photobucket.com/albums/ac180/solamour/gentoo1.png

Funny thing is, when I press "PrntScrn" key, I see a few more lines, and then it gets stuck again with no further progress.
http://i897.photobucket.com/albums/ac180/solamour/gentoo2.png

VirtualBox 4.0 works fine with other guest OSs, such as Ubuntu and WinXP. Gentoo minimal installation disk works OK as well, so I suspect that it might have something to do with my kernel configuration, which isn't genkernel based. I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thank you.
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sol

solamour · Posted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 6:14 am Post subject:

I went back to VirtualBox 3.x for the time being. I'll try it again when a newer version becomes available.
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sol

lyallp · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 9:47 am Post subject:

Did you create a new virtual machine using the existing disk or did the settings migrate over?

I found that some older VM's I have use different disk interfaces to more modern VirtualBox defaults, and thus, the VM's won't boot unless I specifically configure their drive to be IDE.

Basically, very closely inspect all the VirtualBox settings for the VM, maybe something has changed between the versions.
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...Lyall

solamour · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 10:07 am Post subject:

I set the virtual machine's setting in VirtualBox 4.0 same as 3.x with the existing .vdi (hard disk image) file, but that didn't work. So I created a new virtual machine, installed Gentoo from scratch with almost no changes in the kernel options, except the file system and network interface. It was the same result; I see the GRUB screen, kernel messages show up a few seconds, and then it gets stuck.

The kernels in other distros, such as Ubuntu and SystemRescue, were basically "genkernel" type, so I'm not sure what options I'm missing.
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sol

Arkhelion · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2010 Posts: 151 Location: France

Hi,

In the VM settings, I've encountered a lot of issues using the ICH9 chipset, check that your VM uses PIIX3 chipset.
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Arkhelion

lyallp · Posted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 2:04 pm Post subject:

Try booting the Gentoo install/rescue disk.
Type

solamour · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 7:42 am Post subject:

The chipset is PIIX3. And the following is the output of "lspci -k" when booted from the CD.

lyallp · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:22 am Post subject:

Well, you have me stumped.

If you can successfully boot the Gentoo live cd, but can't your own installs, I suggest you switch your own install to use a genkernel and then gradually disable stuff that you know you don't have.
ie, update config, recompile and install, reboot.

Keep doing it till you either end up with a finely tuned lean mean kernel or it stops booting, in which case you will know what caused the problem and you can boot the .old to continue tweaking or you could keep a snapshot of a recent successful boot and simply copy the /usr/src/linux/.config file to a non-snapshot place (a local fileshare or usb key) such that when you roll back, you can recover your latest handywork.
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...Lyall

gentoo_ram · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 6:24 pm Post subject:

I've been having issues running Gentoo guests on Windows Virtualbox hosts for a long time. Even in the 3.x versions of Virtualbox. I can't explain it. I run Linux and Mac Virtualbox hosts with Gentoo guests no problem. Only Windows hosts are a problem. It's very odd. On my latest Windows host/Gentoo guest under VM 4.0, when a process tries to read from an NFS filesystem, the process occasionally goes into "uinterruptible sleep" and never comes back. But only under Windows.

solamour · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 6:56 pm Post subject:

I don't know why, but it looks like I need to turn on "CONFIG_SMP" in the kernel option, even if the virtual machine has only one processor. After selecting SMP, everything is working as expected.

ipic · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 456 Location: UK

gcasillo · Posted: Wed Jan 12, 2011 10:02 pm Post subject:

I am suffering the same symptoms as the OP. I am running VirtualBox 4.0.0 r69151 on a Macbook Pro 17" running OS X 10.6.6. I created a VM for a Gentoo Linux guest and installed from a current amd64 minimal install CD. All seem to go well, but when I attempt to boot from the new installation, I get stuck on in the kernel booting process before the rest of the services are started: