VirtualBox VERR_VERSION_MISMATCH

[mhwombat]

Issue description

I am running VirtualBox 6.0.8 r130520 (Qt5.6.2) on a Windows host. I attempted to upgrade my NixOS, which is running inside virtualbox, to unstable, but I get the following error.

# nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
unpacking channels...
building Nix...
building the system configuration...
updating GRUB 2 menu...
activating the configuration...
setting up /etc...
reloading user units for sddm...
reloading user units for amy...
setting up tmpfiles
warning: the following units failed: virtualbox.service

● virtualbox.service - VirtualBox Guest Services
   Loaded: loaded (/nix/store/713scd5fzydjf93kwzspvmzcf1xzc2hr-unit-virtualbox.service/virtualbox.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2019-06-11 14:38:58 IST; 28ms ago
  Process: 30009 ExecStart=VBoxService --foreground (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
 Main PID: 30009 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.011784 main     6.0.8 r130520 started. Verbose level = 0
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.012596 main     vbglR3GuestCtrlDetectPeekGetCancelSupport: Supported (#1)
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.012838 main     Error: Failed to become guest control master: VERR_VERSION_MISMATCH
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.013335 main     Error: Service 'control' failed to initialize: VERR_VERSION_MISMATCH
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.013465 main     Session 0 is about to close ...
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.013558 main     Stopping all guest processes ...
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.013656 main     Closing all guest files ...
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos VBoxService[30009]: 13:38:58.013774 main     Ended.
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos systemd[1]: virtualbox.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jun 11 14:38:58 eamybut-nixos systemd[1]: virtualbox.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
warning: error(s) occurred while switching to the new configuration

Steps to reproduce

nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade

Technical details

# nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
these paths will be fetched (0.05 MiB download, 0.28 MiB unpacked):
  /nix/store/g6vh8lppwlrn2428wbjnrsgis2qwlgq0-bash-interactive-4.4-p23-dev
copying path '/nix/store/g6vh8lppwlrn2428wbjnrsgis2qwlgq0-bash-interactive-4.4-p23-dev' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 4.14.118, NixOS, 19.09pre182429.98e3b90b6c8 (Loris)`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.2.2`
 - channels(root): `"nixos-19.09pre182429.98e3b90b6c8"`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

Here's my automatically generated hardware configuration:

# cat /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix
# Do not modify this file!  It was generated by ‘nixos-generate-config’
# and may be overwritten by future invocations.  Please make changes
# to /etc/nixos/configuration.nix instead.
{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:

{
  imports = [ ];

  boot.initrd.availableKernelModules = [ "ata_piix" "ohci_pci" "ehci_pci" "sd_mod" "sr_mod" ];
  boot.kernelModules = [ ];
  boot.extraModulePackages = [ ];

  fileSystems."/" =
    { device = "/dev/disk/by-uuid/5d24f3b2-37ff-4a68-ae37-2bc627a56fc7";
      fsType = "ext4";
    };

  swapDevices = [ ];

  nix.maxJobs = lib.mkDefault 1;
  virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.enable = true;
}

This worked fine on NixOS 18.09, but I need to use unstable to take advantage of some of the fixes.

I have temporarily worked around this by commenting out the virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.enable = true; line.

[mhwombat]

It appears that one of the updates during the past 5 days has fixed the problem.

[gloaming]

This has been breaking VirtualBox deployments with NixOps for a while now, I've been working around it by setting

virtualisation.virtualbox.guest.enable = lib.mkForce false;

in the VM configuration. Once the VM has been deployed the line can be removed without causing the crash.

[stale]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info