<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hi Jeff: Actually as per my understanding, Sun is already enabling DKMS on the modules from their closed source latest version (1.6). I would think it makes most sense to follow suit and enable these modules via DKMS in Ubuntu too on the OSE. This is then significantly less work for the kernel maintainers to have to watch over, and instead any MOTU can touch them and fix bugs. Regards, Jeff Schroeder wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:c24352ca0806040742u78fff1ceidec722d462b5f17f@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Since the earlier part of the Hardy development cycle after virtualbox was put in the repositories there has been nothing but trouble with it. This leaves users of virtualbox with a very bad taste in their mouth. It has even caused some to switch away from Ubuntu as their host OS when using virtualbox to virtualize other operating systems. On every single kernel upgrade, there are problems for virtualbox users. The reason is because the virtualbox modules are kernel specific and live in universe. A kernel SRU comes in and the SRU team uploads the new package. The system sees an update, downloads, and installs the new kernel. This in turn creates a new /lib/modules/$kernel_ver directory. modprobe looks in this directory for the vboxdrv module, but that module is in /lib/modules/$old_kernel_ver so it bails out. Short of an ABI bump, the vboxdrv module seems to load fine if manually inserted with insmod. However, this is not an option for "new" linux users. It also seems unacceptable for virtualbox to break after every single kernel upgrade There seem to only be 3 sane approaches to fix this issue: - Move virtualbox-ose-modules over to dkms - Merge virtualbox-ose-modules into linux-ubuntu-modules and the problem goes away transparently - Put big warnings everywhere that say Ubuntu doesn't treat Sun VirtualBox as a first class citezen and it should not be used Does anyone care about VirtualBox or is it an afterthought? This is meant to be a constructive rant. jeff@omniscience:~$ uname -r 2.6.24-18-generic jeff@omniscience:~$ apt-cache search virtualbox-ose-modules | grep generic virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-16-generic - virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-2.6.24-16-generic virtualbox-ose-modules-generic - virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-generic virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-17-generic - virtualbox-ose module for linux-image-2.6.24-17-generic </pre> </blockquote> <div class="moz-signature">-- <title></title> Mario Limonciello Dell | Linux Engineering <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:mario_limonciello@dell.com">mario_limonciello@dell.com</a> </div> </body> </html>