Sebastian Rittau's Blog

I have recently started to use an amd64 kernel on my i386 Debian unstable system. Unfortunately, VirtualBox OSE does not work with that setup. When I try to start a virtual machine, it fails with an oblique error message:

RTR3Init failed with rc=-1912 (rc=-1912)

The VirtualBox kernel modules do not fit to this version of VirtualBox. The installation of VirtualBox was apparently not successful. Executing

'/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup'

should fix that problem. Make sure that you don't mix the OSE version and the PUEL version of VirtualBox.

Debian bug #456391 explains the problem. In that report Michael Meskes alludes to running VirtualBox in an amd64 chroot jail, so I tried this myself. It works flawlessly, once I got it setup. Here is what I did (as root):

robinson:~# mkdir /srv/amd64
robinson:~# cdebootstrap --arch amd64 sid /srv/amd64 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/
[...]
robinson:~# chroot /srv/amd64
robinson:/# apt-get update
[...]
robinson:/# apt-get upgrade
[...]
robinson:/# apt-get install virtualbox-ose # add more packages here if needed
[...]
robinson:/# adduser --uid 1000 --no-create-home --disabled-password --disabled-login srittau
[...]
robinson:/# 

These commands install the base system and create a user account. Now I created a script called /usr/local/bin/amd64.sh:

#!/bin/sh

CHROOT=/srv/amd64

if test ! -e $CHROOT/dev/.udev; then
    mount -t none /dev $CHROOT/dev/ -o bind
fi
if test `ls $CHROOT/proc | wc -l` = "0"; then
    mount -t proc none $CHROOT/proc
fi
if test `ls $CHROOT/sys | wc -l` = "0"; then
    mount -t sysfs none $CHROOT/sys
fi
if test `ls $CHROOT/home | wc -l` = "0"; then
    mount --bind /home $CHROOT/home
fi
chroot $CHROOT sh -c "su - srittau"

Running sudo amd64.sh will now enter the chroot environment as user srittau where I can start virtualbox normally.