VirtualBox upgrade issues
VirtualBox 4.2 has been released for quite a while but I didn’t want to migrate too soon from the stable 4.1. When I finally decided to make the switch I had some issues during the upgrade process. I was following the same simple steps that I took a while ago when I upgraded VirtualBox-3.2 to 4.0.
This is where I got stuck:
sudo yum remove VirtualBox-4.1 Loaded plugins: downloadonly, fastestmirror, security Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile Setting up Remove Process Resolving Dependencies --> Running transaction check ---> Package VirtualBox-4.1.x86_64 0:4.1.24_82872_el6-1 will be erased --> Finished Dependency Resolution Dependencies Resolved ===================================================================================================================================================================================================== Package Arch Version Repository Size ===================================================================================================================================================================================================== Removing: VirtualBox-4.1 x86_64 4.1.24_82872_el6-1 @virtualbox 132 M Transaction Summary ===================================================================================================================================================================================================== Remove 1 Package(s) Installed size: 132 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Downloading Packages: Running rpm_check_debug Running Transaction Test Transaction Test Succeeded Running Transaction
At this stage yum stopped responding. I waited for a few minutes and decided it wasn’t going to work so I tried to find out why. There was an active dkms command that was causing the delay:
/bin/bash /usr/sbin/dkms remove -m vboxhost -v 4.1.24 --all
I killed the yum process and tried to run dkms manually to see if I could reproduce the error:
sudo /usr/sbin/dkms remove -m vboxhost -v 4.1.24 -k 2.6.32-279.19.1.el6.x86_64 -------- Uninstall Beginning -------- Module: vboxhost Version: 4.1.24 Kernel: 2.6.32-279.19.1.el6.x86_64 (x86_64) ------------------------------------- Status: Before uninstall, this module version was ACTIVE on this kernel. Removing any linked weak-modules
At this stage dkms also became unresponsive and there was clearly an issue with (a) certain kernel module(s) therefore I decided to remove all of them manually:
for i in `sudo dkms status vboxhost | awk -F ", " '{print $3}'`; do sudo rm -f /var/lib/dkms/vboxhost/kernel-$i-x86_64/module/* ; done
I confirmed the modules were deleted with:
sudo dkms status vboxhost vboxhost, 4.1.24: added
Then I ran yum remove VirtualBox-4.1 && yum install VirtualBox-4.2 and it was successful this time, but dkms troubleshooting wasn’t complete yet:
sudo dkms status Error! Could not locate dkms.conf file. File: does not exist.
This error was likely related to references to old modules (as I found out later) so I deleted them:
sudo rm /var/lib/dkms/vboxhost/4.1.24/source
and confirmed that all was fine:
sudo dkms status vboxhost, 4.2.6, 3.5.2-10.31.el6.x86_64, x86_64: installed
Thx, this helped me on Debian after upgrading from 4.0 to 4.3.