Support MacOS hosts by moving to VBox 7.1

[ralphlange]

With version 7.1, VirtualBox supports MacOS on Apple silicon (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
That could enable us to have MacOS as an additional host OS and a unified VM environment across all.

Vagrant supports VirtualBox 7.1 (last year, it didn't). (https://developer.hashicorp.com/vagrant/docs/providers/virtualbox)

A task with possibly two independent subtasks:

1. Get the training VM working on Apple silicon in a manually created VBox 7.1
2. Add the Vagrant setup to create the VM on Apple silicon.

Needs Apple users to help!
@kasemir @eddybl @hjunkes @TKorhonen

[Mrcl3]

Vagrant 2.4.3 works on Ubuntu 24 with VirtualBox 7.1. I tried with bento/rockylinux-9.

[ralphlange]

Vagrant 2.4.3 and VBox 7.1.6 work fine on Windows 11: tried rockylinux/9 and bento/ubuntu-24.04

[eddybl]

First note: Vagrant suggests to install vagrant via brew, but the brew version is not correctly updated to 2.4.3: hashicorp/homebrew-tap#294, which currently requires to manually download the latest version

[eddybl]

Just to update this: virtual box works with the new Macs now and it is possible to install Rocky Linux aarch64

The issue with the Phoebus documentation ( #13 ) remains (there are actually quite a lot of JavaFX errors, but Phoebus itself and the Demo panels still run properly)

The second issue remains bluesky. The container which is provided is based on x86_64 architecture. I tried building with an aarch64 supported base image jupyter/minimal-notebook:aarch64-latest instead of jupyter/minimal-notebook:latest, but as this also seems to be based on a different Ubuntu base image issues crop up while trying to install the requirements.txt for some of the packages which have to be built

[simon-ess]

@eddybl - I was not able to get virtual box to work with M2 macs. The error I get when trying to run vagrant up rocky is

Vagrant was unable to detect a disk controller with any of the
following supported types:

IntelAhci ,PIIX4 ,PIIX3 ,ICH6 ,LsiLogic ,BusLogic

Please add one of the supported controller types in order to use the
disk configuration feature.

There appears to be an enhancement request about this: hashicorp/vagrant#13586

How did you get around this?

[eddybl]

Yeah that might have not been clear with my last answer, but I gave up with vagrant at some point.

I tried to follow the instructions to manually set up the training VM to see how far I get without the additional possible complications

[betalb]

@simon-ess Linked issue was merged, not sure when it will be released, but vagrant can be easily monkey-patched, just add below snippet to your Vagrantfile

class VagrantPlugins::ProviderVirtualBox::Model::StorageController
    SCSI_CONTROLLER_TYPES = ["LsiLogic", "BusLogic", "VirtioSCSI"].map(&:freeze).freeze
end

Also bento released plenty on boxes built for virtualbox arm64

[ralphlange]

That sounds promising! Thanks a lot.

@eddybl, @simon-ess: Please try that snippet, so we can add it to the Vagrantfile until the merged fix comes down the release path.

[eddybl]

The monkey patch seems to work, I now fail at:

==> rocky: Checking for guest additions in VM...
    rocky: No guest additions were detected on the base box for this VM! Guest
    rocky: additions are required for forwarded ports, shared folders, host only
    rocky: networking, and more. If SSH fails on this machine, please install
    rocky: the guest additions and repackage the box to continue.
    rocky: 
    rocky: This is not an error message; everything may continue to work properly,
    rocky: in which case you may ignore this message.
==> rocky: Setting hostname...
==> rocky: Mounting shared folders...
    rocky: /Users/blomley/controls/training-vm/ansible => /ansible
Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders. This is usually
because the filesystem "vboxsf" is not available. This filesystem is
made available via the VirtualBox Guest Additions and kernel module.
Please verify that these guest additions are properly installed in the
guest. This is not a bug in Vagrant and is usually caused by a faulty
Vagrant box. For context, the command attempted was:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000,_netdev ansible /ansible

The error output from the command was:

mount: /ansible: unknown filesystem type 'vboxsf'.

[ralphlange]

VBox Guest Additions are missing. The root failure is probably above, where guest additions are installed.

[simon-ess]

It looks like it is something about the rocky linux image we are using. I get the exact same errors (although not for the ubuntu vagrant VM). Following https://github.com/dotless-de/vagrant-vbguest/tree/e3da79581df4356c0052e8771f572d1825e35024, if you run

vagrant vbguest rocky --do install

you get

[rocky] No Virtualbox Guest Additions installation found.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:10:26 ago on Mon 31 Mar 2025 01:49:32 PM UTC.
Package kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.33.1.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
No match for argument: kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.23.2.el9_5.aarch64
Package gcc-11.5.0-5.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
Package binutils-2.35.2-54.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package make-1:4.3-8.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package perl-interpreter-4:5.32.1-481.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package bzip2-1.0.8-10.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
Package elfutils-libelf-devel-0.191-4.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Error: Unable to find a match: kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.23.2.el9_5.aarch64
Skipping unmount of Virtualbox Guest Additions ISO, because it was not mounted.
The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!

`bash -c 'type -p dnf || type -p yum'` install -y kernel-devel kernel-devel-`uname -r` gcc binutils make perl-interpreter bzip2 elfutils-libelf-devel

Stdout from the command:

Last metadata expiration check: 0:10:26 ago on Mon 31 Mar 2025 01:49:32 PM UTC.
Package kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.33.1.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
No match for argument: kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.23.2.el9_5.aarch64
Package gcc-11.5.0-5.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
Package binutils-2.35.2-54.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package make-1:4.3-8.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package perl-interpreter-4:5.32.1-481.el9.aarch64 is already installed.
Package bzip2-1.0.8-10.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
Package elfutils-libelf-devel-0.191-4.el9.aarch64 is already installed.


Stderr from the command:

Error: Unable to find a match: kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.23.2.el9_5.aarch64

which seems to suggest that there is some dependency missing for rocky linux...

[ralphlange]

Note:

Package kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.33.1.el9_5.aarch64 is already installed.
No match for argument: kernel-devel-5.14.0-503.23.2.el9_5.aarch64

That's often happening if the first update (of the base box) updates the kernel version.
It is covered in the Vagrant instructions as:

In case of kernel updates and a mismatch of VirtualBox versions between your host and the Vagrant base box image, the vagrant vbguest step fails with not being able to download the correct version of the kernel development package. The error messages contain e.g.:

Package kernel-devel-5.14.0-427.42.1.el9_4.x86_64 is already installed.
No match for argument: kernel-devel-5.14.0-427.13.1.el9_4.x86_64

In that case, reboot the VM from the VirtualBox GUI using 'ACPI shutdown' and re-run the vagrant up and vagrant vbguest steps.