9.1 Beta1 - VirtualBox Guest Additions not working properly

[SeanSeymour]

Hello there, new to PC-BSD and loving it so far. I installed 9.1 Beta as a VirtualBox Guest (Host is openSUSE 12.1). Once it was up and running I installed the Guest Additions via the control panel as outlined in the wiki. Was then able to select the vboxvideo driver and get a full screen 1600x1200 resolution, so it seemed like it installed fine.

However, the other guest additions features don't work. I don't see my shared folder, and the mouse cursor doesn't get captured/released automatically. I have to click in the vm window to capture it, then press the right Ctrl button to release it from the vm. I am often moving between a lot of windows and other vms that are running so having mouse integration not working is kind of a pain.

I looked at VBoxSVC.log and VirtualBox.xml in my openSUSE's ~/.VirtualBox directory, didn't see anything relevant there. Also, mouse integration/guest additions work fine with my other VBox VMs, that's why I suspect something PC-BSD specific. I searched for this specific issue on these forums and google, didn't find an answer yet. Any help or a point in the right direction is appreciated.

Thanks!
Sean

[dannomac]

Hi Sean.

I looked into this and reported a bug in TRAC. What I found is two separate issues. The first is that the VirtualBox guest kernel module isn't loaded before the system goes graphical. To fix that add this line to /boot/loader.conf:

vboxguest_load="YES"

That should fix any graphics issues.

The second is that the vboxmouse driver (necessary for pointer integration) never gets loaded. There is a HAL configuration that I think should be installed as part of the VirtualBox guest package. You can find it at

http://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox/ towards the bottom. It involves creating a file named 90-vboxguest.fdi in /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy. Its contents should be:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
# Sun VirtualBox
# Hal driver description for the vboxmouse driver
# $Id: 90-vboxguest.fdi 21412 2009-07-08 21:18:57Z vboxsync $

     Copyright (C) 2008-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.

     This file is part of VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE), as
     available from http://www.virtualbox.org. This file is free software;
     you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
     General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software
     Foundation, in version 2 as it comes in the "COPYING" file of the
     VirtualBox OSE distribution. VirtualBox OSE is distributed in the
     hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY of any kind.

     Please contact Sun Microsystems, Inc., 4150 Network Circle, Santa
     Clara, CA 95054 USA or visit http://www.sun.com if you need
     additional information or have any questions.
-->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.subsystem" string="pci">
      <match key="info.product" string="VirtualBox Guest Service">
        <append key="info.capabilities" type="strlist">input</append>
        <append key="info.capabilities" type="strlist">input.mouse</append>
        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">vboxmouse</merge>
        <merge key="input.device" type="string">/dev/vboxguest</merge>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

[SeanSeymour]

Thanks so much, dannomac! Worked like a charm. I had visited that freebsd virtualbox wiki page towards the beginning, but after checking my PC and seeing that PC-BSD already had made most of those configuration settings, I left the page and never continued all the way down to that bottom section. My bad, and thanks again!