On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 7:29 AM Wols Lists <[email protected]> wrote: > > Simple problem, after a kernel upgrade, virtualbox no longer works. This > is to be expected, of course, BUT ... >
I can't offer any VirtualBox-specific solutions but I would try reinstalling it as others have suggested (emerge -1 virtualbox-modules). Some more general suggestions: 1. I use Virtualbox on Windows as there aren't a lot of good free alternatives that I'm aware of. I stopped using it on Linux ages ago because KVM/libvirt are generally much better these days. app-emulation/virt-manager is a nice front-end for libvirt which will be reminiscent of Virtualbox, but it uses the kernel's built-in KVM as the engine and libvirt for management. You can use the nice gui of course, but everything is also manageable via the command line and is easily scriptable, or turned into services. 2. Anytime I'm using either out-of-kernel modules or more experimental features in the kernel (zfs, nvidia binary drivers, btrfs, etc) I tend to carefully control what kernel series I'm running. I pick an LTS that is supported and stable for everything I'm doing, and stick with it until the next LTS is stable and seems ok to me, and then I do some testing before migrating. I just switched to 5.10 a few weeks ago. In general you're unlikely to get regressions or issues with out-of-tree drivers between minor releases (eg 5.10.81 to 5.10.82), but depending on the software you can get them between major releases (eg 5.4.162 to 5.10.82). Also, updates between minor releases tend to be really trivial to build since the config files almost never change, or at most a make oldconfig rarely gives you a single prompt to answer. Gentoo doesn't really manage kernel QA around out-of-tree modules. Other distros will pick and choose - for example, if the distro wants to support zfs as an option then it will only release stable kernels that work with zfs. It is pretty easy though on Gentoo to just manage your own kernel, so you don't have to worry about what out-of-tree modules are/aren't supported officially. Of course you're still at the mercy of upstream - if Nvidia doesn't want to release a driver for your 20 year old GPU that works with a kernel that still gets security updates then you're up the creek. That's just the price of using out-of-tree modules. This is just another reason to run KVM - everything it uses in kernel space is built into the kernel, and basically "just works." The userspace stuff doesn't care so much about kernel versions since the syscall interface is stable. -- Rich
