vboxdrv + KVM = General Protection Fault

Greetings!

I just tried to install VirtualBox, a nifty virtualization tool from Innotek, on my Gentoo machine- but encountered a pretty scary general protection fault. Whenever Virtualbox tried to start a virtual machine, a general protection fault would occur, X would crash, and I would have to shut down with Alt+Sysrq+R/S/E/I/U/B and then holding the power button down for a few seconds.

It turned out that the kernel module used by Virtualbox, vboxdrv, conflicted with the KVM code in the Linux kernel. The solution was to simply re-configure my kernel, disable the KVM stuff (Device Drivers -> Virtualization -> [ ] Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support), recompile and boot from the new kernel.

Users who have KVM loaded as a module should simply unload it, and prevent it from being automatically loaded on boot, if it is.

You can view the error, posted by Poulpatine, from this Virtualbox support ticket.

I’ve been using Linux since Ubuntu 5.04- but I’ve never seen a GPF. This piece of troubleshooting was pretty educational.