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:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="ibt=off"

After a reboot I could rebuild the vbox kernel driver via /sbin/vboxconfig, which ran through without issues, and after that the VM started up just fine.

  1. Honestly, I’d prefer to keep IBT enabled for security reasons, but I need the VM to work. Let’s hope VirtualBox fixes this soon, though given how long this seems to have gone on I’m a bit skeptical. ↩︎