LHC@home

Hi,

we are setting up shop on our new machines with Suse tumbleweed. We install boinc and vbox as usual, and we get tasks after joining the machine to my account.

However, they all fail with

...
2021-02-12 16:57:13 (62116): Starting VM. (boinc_1ce17a18ec64a970, slot#0)
2021-02-12 16:57:13 (62116): Error in start VM for VM: -2135228411
Command:
VBoxManage -q startvm "boinc_1ce17a18ec64a970" --type headless
Output:
VBoxManage: error: Could not launch the VM process for the machine 'boinc_1ce17a18ec64a970' (VERR_ACCESS_DENIED)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine, callee nsISupports
VBoxManage: error: Context: "LaunchVMProcess(a->session, sessionType.raw(), ComSafeArrayAsInParam(aBstrEnv), progress.asOutParam())" at line 726 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp
...

This is AFAICT the same error as here

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=99518

https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/forum_thread.php?id=5499#43250

We tried

skluth@atlas246:~$ groups boinc
boinc : boinc vboxusers

but it does not fix the problem.

It looks like something Suse t-weed specific in how boinc and vbox are configured.

Any great ideas?

Cheers, Stefan

Suse Leap keeps older kernels after an upgrade which sometimes causes similar issues.
I'm not sure if Tumbleweed does the same.
To fix it you may remove all kernels except the most recent one.
Then reboot and run "[sudo] rcvboxdrv setup" (just to be sure; it should run automatically).

In rare cases permissions are wrong at higher levels.
Hence, each level of the path /var/lib/boinc/... should be checked.

It was simple, boinc needs to be member of group vboxusers in order for the vbox handling to work.

A simple fix is to add user boinc to group vboxusers, and restart the boinc daemon.

For a large pool of machines that doesn't really scale, so we let systemd do the work with

skluth@atlas246:~$ cat /etc/systemd/system/boinc-client.service
...
[Service]
...
User=boinc
SupplementaryGroups=vboxusers
...
That makes systemd start boinc as a member of group vboxusers. After that it worked fine. Its a simple config file, and thus easily distributed.

I am running Tumbleweed in a Virtual Machine on a Windows 10 host. It is constantly updated and I have to reboot it nearly every time. My latest kernel is 5.10.14.I have kept it as the sole machine in Science United. Last time it updated 2300 Linux packages and I rebooted it.
Tullio

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I am now downloading 226 updates with kernel 5.10.16
Tulllio

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