Hello:

Sorry for the late reply.
This has kept me rather busy. 8^°

On 26 Nov 2023 at 6:36, Arnt Karlsen wrote:

I think I have made some progress with respect to what *may* be
happening. This is all above my pay grade so take my comments with a
few grains of salt.

For the sake of clarity/brevity I will skip the long story and just
post the essentials:

1.
Have backintime so went rolled to the VM snapshot from the end of
October, the oldest one I have.

Concurrently, rolled back to VBox (7.0.6) along with its
GuestAdditions 7.0.6.

That would rule out (?) a VBox update or some corruption in the XPSP3
VM as everything happened way after that date.

At least I did not notice it.
I do not often use the XP VM.

Problem did *not* go away.

2.
Removed VBox (7.0.6) / GuestAdditions 7.0.6, reinstalled the latest
available (7.0.12) along with GuestAdditions and the Extension Pack
which was missing.

Problem did *not* go away.

3.
Went back to the last snapshot and tried to fix things by mucking
around the XPSP3 installation but only managed to screw it up even
more.

The net result being that it is now on a 'black screen select how to
boot' and 'blue screen with whatever' loop.

I had forgotten just how annoying all this MS shit was.

4.
I attempted to add a new XP VM using three or four of the
downloadable XP isos I found on the web and was able to install one
of them as a VM.

Problem did *not* go away and shutdown does not work.
Not even shutting down X.
Have to reboot my box.

--- snip ---

> ..how do you shut it down, in the vm or from the host?
I do *ctrl+backspace* to zap the X server.

*vboxmanage controlvm "vm_name" poweroff* hangs at ~20% and even then
sometimes *ctrl+backspace* won't work and have to shut down the box.

> ..does the vm guest even need to be shut down, if it can
> be "paused" or somesuch by VirtualBox before VirtualBox
> is shut down?
Yes, but I have never had the need to do that.

I either have it *running* to do whatever I have to do with the
Blackberry and its software or *stopped* as I really don't do much
else with that VM.

TL;DR

The problem exists whether I have VirtualBox 7.06 or 7.0.12, with a
recovered version of the VM or the latest one.

Installing a new XPSP3 VM, whether in VirtualBox 7.0.6 or 7.0.12,
complete with GA+EP does not solve the problem.

In all cases, disconnecting the host from the web (cable and all)
does not solve the problem so phoning home does not seem to be a
problem.

>From all this I think that the problem at hand is not related to VBox
or the MS software, which may or may not require a specific *.iso to
work.

The only valid conclusion I have is that, at some point, something
may have gone wrong with a Devuan update/upgrade.

One of the important packages updated lately was linux-kbuild.
ie: 5.10.179-5~deb10u1 to 5.10.197-1~deb10u1

It is over my pay grade to know what it does but it seems it is
related to how modprobe works with modules.

And here be modules at work:

[code]
~$ lsmod | grep vbox
vboxnetadp             28672  0
vboxnetflt             32768  1
vboxdrv               589824  4 vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt   # <- this one
~$
[/code]

---

On 26 Nov 2023 at 12:59, dng@??? wrote:

> Did you install the latest extension pack for Virtualbox?
Ahh ...
Had forgotten all about that.
Done.

Problem remains.
Please see above.

> IDE, SATA or SCSI and does changing it make any difference?
It was at the default setting.

Thank you both for your input.

If anyone has a clue as to what the trace in dmesng indicates, I'm
all ears.

[code]
------------[ cut here ]------------
--- snip ---

WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 16511 at arch/x86/kernel/fpu/core.c:129
kernel_fpu_begin_mask+0xc9/0xe0
--- snip ---
Call Trace:
[ +0.000031] SUPR0FpuBegin+0x13/0x20 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000006] ? up+0x12/0x50
[ +0.000014] ? VBoxHost_RTThreadCtxHookEnable+0x32/0x40 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000012] ? supdrvIOCtl+0xc5e/0x3650 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000013] ? rtR0MemAllocEx+0x57/0xd0 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000012] ? supdrvIOCtlFast+0x58/0xb0 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000011] ? VBoxDrvLinuxIOCtl_7_0_12+0x57/0x230 [vboxdrv]
[ +0.000003] ? __x64_sys_ioctl+0x84/0xc0
[ +0.000004] ? do_syscall_64+0x33/0x80
[ +0.000003] ? entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9
[ +0.000002] ---[ end trace 2d76295c57757cc8 ]---
[/code]

Thanks in advance.

Best,

S.