LHC@home

Hello everyone,

I share the solution I found to run boinc tasks in Virtualbox.

I use the following software :
- Linux Debian 11
- Boinc 7.16.16
- VirtualBox 6.1

I have no problem running all the LHC tasks or other Boinc projects not using Virtualbox. But when I ran a virtualbox task, I got the following errors:
"Postponed: Communication with VM Hypervisor failed".

And in the stderr.txt file:

2022-03-27 05:22:37 (145381): vboxwrapper (7.7.26197): starting
2022-03-27 05:22:42 (145381): Error in guest additions for VM: -1041038848
Command:
VBoxManage -q list systemproperties
Output:
VBoxManage: error: Failed to create the VirtualBox object!
VBoxManage: error: Code NS_ERROR_SOCKET_FAIL (0xC1F30200) - IPC daemon socket error (extended info not available)
VBoxManage: error: Most likely, the VirtualBox COM server is not running or failed to start.

2022-03-27 05:22:42 (145381): Feature: Checkpoint interval offset (50 seconds)
2022-03-27 05:22:42 (145381): Detected: VirtualBox VboxManage Interface (Version: 6.1.28)

While searching for the solution, I found this issue: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/3355

So I modified the file /usr/lib/systemd/system/boinc-client.service and uncommented this line in the [Service] section:

PrivateTmp=true

After reloading the systemd daemon and restarting the boinc-client service, boinc started computing the Virtualbox task.

I hope this can help someone,
Philippe

But be careful, this modification may block X11 idle detection

So I modified the file /usr/lib/systemd/system/boinc-client.service and uncommented this line in the [Service] section:

PrivateTmp=true

Thanks, but it was already uncommented on my system (Ubuntu 20.04.4 and BOINC 7.16.6, with VirtualBox 6.1.32).

Do you mean that it should be commented out?
# PrivateTmp=true

In Boinc source the line is commented.
(https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/blob/73a7754e7fd1ae3b7bf337e8dd42a7a0b42cf3d2/client/scripts/boinc-client.service.in)

To solve the problem you have to uncomment the line :

#PrivateTmp=true  #Block X11 idle detection

If you want to activate those options it would be better to place them in an override file.
This ensures your settings are not overwritten by updates.
It's mentioned in the file you linked how to do this.