[clug] Ubuntu 20.04 kernels and VirtualBox

Bob Edwards bob at cs.anu.edu.au
Tue Jul 21 23:30:06 UTC 2020


Hi Tony,

I have VirtualBox (6.1.10) installed on a number of Ubuntu 20.04
systems, including on VMware Horizon and on  VMware Player, but
I haven't tried upgrading anything (yet).

I ran your find command and only got 5.4.0-40-generic and 5.4.0-42-generic.

How did you install VirtualBox?

Something might be wrong with your kernel header file(s). Maybe purge
and re-install?

cheers,
Bob Edwards.

On 22/7/20 1:58 am, Tony Lewis via linux wrote:
> I recently upgraded to (K)Ubuntu 20.04 but there was a problem upgrading 
> the VirtualBox kernel modules.  After much head scratching in shell 
> scripts and makefiles, it appears that VirtualBox was trying to build 
> modules into /lib/modules/5.4.44 rather than 
> /lib/modules/5.4.0-42-generic.  After more head scratching, I find that 
> the kernel.release file contains '5.4.44'.  This appears to be the same 
> for other variants for 5.4.0 Ubuntu kernels, but a sample 5.3.0 kernel I 
> installed has the expected '5.3.0-62-generic' contents:
> 
>     $ find /usr/src -name kernel.release -exec grep . {} \; -print
>     5.4.41
>     /usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-39-generic/include/config/kernel.release
>     5.3.0-62-generic
>     /usr/src/linux-headers-5.3.0-62-generic/include/config/kernel.release
>     5.4.44
>     /usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/kernel.release
>     5.4.44
>     /usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-40-generic/include/config/kernel.release
> 
> What's really weird is that the native package that I downloaded and 
> extracted manually has '5.4.0-42-generic':
> 
>       $ dpkg -x
>     
> /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic_5.4.0-42.46_amd64.deb 
> 
>     lh42
>       $ find lh42 -name kernel.release -exec grep . {} \; -print
>     5.4.0-42-generic
>     
> lh42/usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/kernel.release
> 
> Even more weird is that if I then check the package against the 
> checksums, some 17 files have been changed:
> 
>     # md5sum -c
>     /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic.md5sums| grep -v OK
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/.config: FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/.config.old: FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/auto.conf: FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/auto.conf.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/kernel.release:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/config/tristate.conf:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/include/generated/autoconf.h:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/basic/.fixdep.cmd: 
> FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.conf.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.confdata.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.expr.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     
> usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.lexer.lex.c.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     
> usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.lexer.lex.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     
> usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.parser.tab.h.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     
> usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.parser.tab.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     
> usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.preprocess.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-42-generic/scripts/kconfig/.symbol.o.cmd:
>     FAILED
>     md5sum: WARNING: 17 computed checksums did NOT match
> 
> But for the 5.3.x headers, there were no mismatches:
> 
>     # md5sum -c
>     /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-5.3.0-62-generic.md5sums| grep -v
>     OK | wc -l
>     0
> 
> Is something broken here?  I can't understand what could be changing the 
> files upon install (the .postinst file doesn't appear to do much).
> 
> My baseball bat fix was to copy the manually extracted files across over 
> the installed files, and then my VirtualBox would build its kernel 
> modules and run.  But I'm keen to try and figure out what the issue is 
> here.
> 
> Any clues?
> 
> Tony
> 
> 
> 
> 



More information about the linux mailing list