Fedora

I (accidentally1) did a software update on my laptop last night, and this morning when I needed my Win10 VM for something, VirtualBox threw an error like this at me: VirtualBox can’t operate in VMX root mode. Please disable the KVM kernel extension, recompile your kernel and reboot (VERR_VMX_IN_VMX_ROOT_MODE). A quick web search for “fedora update virtualbox vboxisomaker” gave me this forum post and consequently this bug report, in which I found the solution: I just had to add the kernel parameter kvm.enable_virt_at_load=0 to disable KVM - which comes enabled by default since Kernel 6.12. I accomplished that with grubby: ...

I recently did a software update on my laptop running Fedora 38, and that also brought in a kernel update. Starting my Win10 VirtualBox VM afterwards no longer worked as it needed the kernel module to be recompiled. However, that failed: $ sudo /sbin/vboxconfig [sudo] password for gina: vboxdrv.sh: Stopping VirtualBox services. depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.order at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.builtin at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory depmod: WARNING: could not open modules.builtin.modinfo at /lib/modules/6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64: No such file or directory vboxdrv.sh: Starting VirtualBox services. vboxdrv.sh: Building VirtualBox kernel modules. egrep: warning: egrep is obsolescent; using grep -E vboxdrv.sh: failed: Look at /var/log/vbox-setup.log to find out what went wrong. There were problems setting up VirtualBox. To re-start the set-up process, run /sbin/vboxconfig as root. If your system is using EFI Secure Boot you may need to sign the kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before you can load them. Please see your Linux system's documentation for more information. A look into /var/log/vbox-setup.log revealed an error along the lines of this one1: ...

For accounting and some windows only software (👋 Affinity Designer) I have a Windows 10 VM running in VirtualBox on my Framework running Fedora 38. Apparently I got a kernel update recently and as of this morning the VM refused to start. It just hung, and a look into journalctl showed something like this: Jun 13 10:23:50 draper kernel: traps: Missing ENDBR: 0xffff9b688c308f30 After some searching I came across this thread on the VirtualBox forums which explained the issue and also includes the solution. Apparently the VirtualBox kernel driver triggers Intel’s IBT (indirect branch tracking). The solution is to disable that1 by passing ibt=off as a kernel parameter: ...

I’m currently in the process of setting up my new Frame.work laptop, and since I’ve been using Debian-derivatives for the past two decades now, I decided to use the opportunity, try something new for once and installed Fedora1. Something that got annoying quickly is that the package manager command dnf defaults to “no” when asking if you really want to install a package plus its dependencies. I’m very used to apt’s behaviour here that allows me to type sudo apt install <package> and then just hit Enter on the sanity check. I wanted the same for dnf, but without bypassing the sanity check altogether. I did some digging together with my buddy Ben and we found the answer. ...