[gentoo-user] Kernel parameters for VirtualBox

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello list,

I'm going round in circles here. I've been running VirtualBox and BOINC	 for 
years with no problems to speak of.

Over the last year or more I've experienced mysterious failures in many 
programs, some of them real nuisances, and recently I decided to replace my 
RAM modules with a single matched set, which seems to have done the trick - so 
far! It's required complete recompilation of everything, and throwing away 
quite a lot of data that seemed to have been damaged at some time (hello 
KMail).

Now however I can't get VirtualBox running properly. I've tried the latest 
stable version and two testing versions, but at every login via KDM I get a 
pop-up notice "VBoxClient: the VirtualBox kernel service is not running." 
That's without any clients active or trying to be. If I then start virtualbox-
guest-additions I get this:

# /etc/init.d/virtualbox-guest-additions start
 * Loading kernel modules
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'vboxguest': No such device
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'vboxsf': No such device
 * ERROR: virtualbox-guest-additions failed to start

I assume I'm missing something in my kernel config, but I can't see what.

linux # grep -i virt .config
# CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN is not set
CONFIG_HAVE_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN=y
CONFIG_VIRT_TO_BUS=y
# CONFIG_FB_VIRTUAL is not set
# CONFIG_SND_VIRTUOSO is not set
CONFIG_VIRT_DRIVERS=y
# Virtio drivers
# CONFIG_VIRTIO_PCI is not set
# CONFIG_VIRTIO_MMIO is not set
# CONFIG_DEBUG_VIRTUAL is not set
CONFIG_VIRTUALIZATION=y

Most of those unset values are for when this kernel is running as a guest of 
another OS, so I assume I don't need them when running as the host OS. Others 
I can't set because they're hidden until I set the values to be a guest.

I can find lots of other people struggling with this and similar problems, but 
no fix.

Any ideas here?

-- 
Rgds
Peter