• VirtualBox

This page details the ongoing effort of porting VirtualBox to FreeBSD.

VirtualBox has been committed to the FreeBSD portstree. There is also a chapter about VirtualBox on FreeBSD in the Handbook.

Contact

The following individuals are reachable on #fbsd-mentors, irc.unixfreunde.de, or Mailinglist freebsd-emulation(at)FreeBSD.org

• decke
• dhn
• beat
• miwi
• nox

Known Issues

• Build fails if openssl is installed from ports (see here).

  • This should no longer be a problem with VirtualBox 3.0.51.r22902_2 Makefile Revision 1.11 and up

• Kernel panic when loading/unloading the module (sometimes reproducible but not always -> PR).

• Launching virtual machine on 8.0-BETA2/amd64 instantly panic the system (see here)

• Panic when starting Windows XP guest on CURRENT (see here -> workaround)

• Some ATI users report problems with GLX support (see here).

• After updating host OS and rebuilding virtualbox the host freeze after starting guest OS with graphical user interface. -> Update libGL and its dependents: portmaster -r libGL-\* (see here).

• Updating virtualbox with portmaster may fail. In this case update virtualbox manually: cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox/ && make && make deinstall && make install

  • This should no longer be a problem with portmaster versions 2.12 and up

• Build fails if kernel, userland and/or src are not in sync: (see here or here)

• VIMAGE kernel option freeze system with bridged networking (see here)

• Some features are not implemented yet:
  • USB
  • OpenGL support

Hints

Host DVD/CD access

• atapicam kernel module needs to be loaded
• HAL has to run at the moment
• Permissions to access /dev/xpt0, /dev/cdN and /dev/passN

Bridged Networking

• load the modules vboxnetflt and vboxnetadp (in that order)
• select Bridged Adapter in the Network tab
• select your physical adapter to bridge to

If the VM will not start up with an "Unable to create" error, unload both modules again and reload them. There seems to be something undeterministic that breaks this from time to time. Loading the modules from /boot/loader.conf will usually not work.

Troubleshooting

• Make sure your running kernel, world and src are in sync
• AMD64 users explicitly need COMPAT_IA32 in their kernel config
• /proc should be mounted via /etc/fstab and the vbox kernel module should be loaded via /boot/loader.conf
• Make sure you add vbox to your group
• Disable VT-x
• Disable BIOS setting "Virtual Machine Manager functions"

• Visualisation problems? Set environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 prior to start VirtualBox.

• If you cannot launch VirtualBox, even using root:

  1. Launch VirtualBox

  2. If it fails open top(1)

  3. In top(1) you should see 2(!) processes "VirtualBox"

  4. Kill one of them.
  5. The other one should start