[SOLVED] First Install, boot hangs

[vaderbaboom]

Hi all,

I know this has been asked ad nauseum and I'm terribly sorry for adding yet another "my install hangs at boot and I can't get in". I have searched for this issue for so long and tried as many scenarios as I can throughout all the different threads google has offered. I still can't get it. I have reinstalled over and over with slightly different configs thinking one will work and nothing. So alas I have no choice but to ask for some help. Here is the information:

Windows 11 host
VirtualBox r149290
Stage-3-openrc-desktop

System:
Thinkpad P53
Intel core i7-9850H ( Has 12 logical processors, allotted 5 processors to VB)
11061MB of RAM
Intel core i7

Config files:
Kernel .config: http://dpaste.com/6VR3KZMXL
Make.conf: http://dpaste.com/2G2ZDWC56 (I commented out the video_cards, use and grub_platforms to see if it would make a difference. I was using the gentoo-kernel but ended up converting to custom because of the changes I was constantly making hence the commented out kbuild_output)
Lspci: http://dpaste.com/8KAA7S6U8
I am using efibootmgr, I thought it was a bootloader issue before so i uninstalled grub, installed refind, didn't work so i removed them both and went with efibootmgr, same results, just cleaner lol

I'm fully aware it's going to be something small or ridiculous and I'm sorry in advance. I'm at my wits end! I've been using the handbook and the virtualbox pages for install.

Thank you all so so much for everything

Edit: i followed the config instructions in the “Thinkpad P53” article on the wiki and a reboot after recompiling the kernel re-configuring efibootmgr brings me to the same result stuck in the boot screen. I did not install the nvidia-drivers.

[Leonardo.b]

Try to understand where boot stucks.
Do you see the bootloader message (GRUB, rEFInd)?
Do you see anything at all on the screen, when you start the system?

Welcome to the forum.

[vaderbaboom]

So I see: BsdDx (or something like that) looking for the efi file, followed by a line saying it has found it and is starting. Then there’s nothing after that. On the odd time it loads past that stage, it starts the services and stops at “no soundcard detected”

Sorry I’ll send you a screenshot when i get home.

[vaderbaboom]

Here's the screenshot:

https://imgur.com/6StFXWO

[Leonardo.b]

VirtualBox tries to load ./efi/boot/bootx64.efi. Path is relative to your bootable partition (the one formatted FAT).
Mount it, and look inside.
Is there such a file? Is it your kernel?

Imgur is broken for browsers without JavaScript.

[grknight]

You boot is likely not hanging. More often than not, people are unprepared for setting up video drivers in the kernel for UEFI.

There are a bunch of recent threads on this topic in this forum.

See comments like mine with [post=8689475]this post[/post] and other solved UEFI black screen topics

[Irre]

An other option is to start with a simpler boot loader, lilo. Create an ext2 partition and place /boot there.

[alamahant]

Use this kernel config
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/VirtualBox#Gentoo_guests
Or
gentoo-kernel-bin
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sy ... kernel-bin
together with an initramfs.

[vaderbaboom]

Thank you all so much for your help!

After tons of reading, researching and experimentation, I finally got it to work. @grknight's linked post sent me down a rabbit hole and I ended up trying various combinations of drivers. I realized I was enabling too many graphics drivers and FB devices, and while I don't think it was the FB devices so much as it was the graphics drivers I was able to learn about that through the experimenting. I also learned (this was a really stupid oversight on my part) that while my laptop has both intel and nvidia graphics, they are not a part of the VM. @alamahant's link is where I ended up and what I found was that I did not need to enable the drivers per the handbook AND the virtualbox link below, in fact I needed to enable the drivers and FB's from the virtualbox guide ONLY. When I removed the intel and nvidia graphics, and selected the vmware driver and the simple framebuffer and the vmware framebuffer, it worked.

Thank you all again, this has been extremely educational!

[Hu]

You are not the first to fall into this trap. There is a weirdly common misunderstanding that virtual machines will by default present to the guest hardware which is at all similar to the host hardware. This can be done in certain special cases, but generally is not done by default. For various reasons, virtual machines use specific virtual hardware, often based on either very old physical hardware (such as early 2000s network cards) or on a design that was never manufactured as physical hardware (virtio console, for example). These are usually picked either (a) because OS support for those devices is very broad, giving a good chance that whether you want to run any of the dialects of Windows (sometimes going back to Windows 98!), or an old Linux, or a modern Linux, it will be able to operate the virtual device or (b) because the device is especially easy to emulate in the hypervisor. For the latter, it will be a device that lacks fancy features like multiple queues, asynchronous notifications, etc. The goal there is for the hypervisor to be able to accurately emulate the device using as little code as possible.