Installing VirtualBox OSE in FreeBSD 9

Installing VirtualBox from the FreeBSD ports tree is not as straightforward as you may expect.

You may in fact hit a couple of snags. The first one is that you are required to have the FreeBSD kernel source installed or else it will stop while trying to compile the network drivers.

The second is an incompatibility between VirtualBox and the newer kernels which results in the following error during compilation;

error: 'D_PSEUDO' undeclared here (not in a function)

Perform the following steps as the root user to get Vbox installed.

First, you need to install the kernel sources and rebuild your world and kernel;

Once done, login again as root and change to the directory for the virtualbox-ose port;

cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose

This port will install virtualbox-ose-kmod as a dependency which is where the error causing the error shown above is hiding.

We need to edit one of the source files before we attempt to compile;

# vi ../virtualbox-ose-kmod/work/VirtualBox-4.0.12_OSE/out/freebsd.amd64/release/bin/src/vboxdrv/freebsd/SUPDrv-freebsd.c

On or about line 104 you will see the following C code;

#if __FreeBSD_version > 800061
    .d_flags =          D_PSEUDO | D_TRACKCLOSE | D_NEEDMINOR,
#else
    .d_flags =          D_PSEUDO | D_TRACKCLOSE,
#endif


Change it, removing the D_PSUEDO flag so it looks like this;


#if __FreeBSD_version > 800061
    .d_flags =          D_TRACKCLOSE | D_NEEDMINOR,
#else
    .d_flags =          D_PSEUDO | D_TRACKCLOSE,
#endif

Now, we are ready to do a normal build of virtualbox;

make install clean

Use these configure options 

To allow VirtualBox access to hardware such as CD/DVD drives you should also install HALD;

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/hal

make install clean

Create /boot/loader.conf and add these lines;

atapicam_load="YES"
vboxdrv_load="YES"

Add these options to your /etc/rc.conf;

vboxnet_enable="YES" # Enable virtualbox
hald_enable="YES" # Required to allow virtualbox to access CDROM device
dbus_enable="YES" # Required by hald

Add these lines to /etc/devfs.conf:

own     vboxnetctl  root:vboxusers
perm    vboxnetctl  0660
perm  cd0   0660
perm  xpt0   0660
perm  pass0   0660

Add all users that need virtualbox to the vboxusers group:

# pw groupmod vboxusers -m username

Finally, reboot the machine;

init 6