Friday 15 September 2017

Rebuild kernel modules for VirtualBox on Linux automatically

I prefer to install packages distributed by VirtualBox rather than packages built by the distro maintainers as I don't have to wait for a new package when a new kernel is released. Unfortunately this involves rebuilding the vbox kernel modules after the new kernel is booted. So I decided to devise a way to automate this.

First I wrote a script to check if the vbox modules are loaded and if not to run the setup script. It's just this:

#!/bin/sh
sleep 120
if ! lsmod | grep -s vbox > /dev/null
then
       /usr/lib/virtualbox/vboxdrv.sh setup
fi


The sleep is needed as in some init systems cron comes up even before all the modules are loaded. Next, I installed a crontab entry that runs the script above once at bootup, using the @reboot notation:


@reboot /root/bin/vboxdrv

This goes into root's crontab, using crontab -e.

And voilà, that's all that's needed.

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