vbox driver

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jul 05), Gary Jennejohn said:
> On Sat, 4 Jul 2009 17:09:33 +0000 (UTC)
> rondzierwa at comcast.net wrote:
> > I have installed the VirtualBox port my FreeBSD 7.0 system. I had to
> > csup ports and download and install the virtualbox port manually, but
> > eventually everything built and installed.
> > 
> > kldload has a problem with the vboxdrv module: 
> > 
> > phoenix# kldload /boot/modules/vboxdrv.ko 
> > kldload: can't load /boot/modules/vboxdrv.ko: No such file or directory 
> > 
> > the file is there, and kldconfig is set up for the /boot/modules directory: 
> > 
> > phoenix# kldconfig -r 
> > /boot/kernel;/boot/modules 
> > phoenix# ls -l /boot/modules 
> > total 182 
> > -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 185300 Jul 4 12:57 vboxdrv.ko 
> > 
> > could it be that there is no vboxdrv.ko.symbols file? all the other
> > modules are in the /boot/kernel directory, and they all have .symbols
> > files.
> > 
> 
> This error message is confusing and doesn't necessarily really have
> anything to do with vboxdrv.ko being present.  kldload(2) in the kernel
> can return a number of errors, but they're all hidden behind the error
> message "can't load..."
> 
> kldload(8) should probably use perror(3) so the user can see exactly
> what the error returned from the kernel was.

kldload did use perror; the kernel returned ENOENT - "No such file or
directory".  The problem is that the 92 defined errno values are not enough
to describe all possible ways a syscall can fail.  When loading a module,
the most likely cause of ENOENT is a missing symbol preventing the linker
from loading the module.  The kernel will print a more verbose message to
the console, so run dmesg and see what it's complaining about.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com