vagrant cant start ubuntu/focal64 anymore

[Hartmut Holzgraefe]

Not sure when this actually started, as I'm still using bionic VMs most of the time.

The following works:

vagrant init ubuntu/bionic64
vagrant up

While this does not:

vagrant init ubuntu/focal64
vagrant up

When I enable GUI output I can see the boot process getting stuck, sometimes as early as after the Btrfs initialization message, sometimes as late as after "Starting Joural Service".

VM never fully comes up, but can't be stopped either,

vagrant down

just hangs, and the VirtualBox gui shows the VM as "shutting down" forever.
Only by doing a hard "kill -9" on the virtualbox process I can bring it down.

Seeing this on two machines, both host systems are running Focal, upgraded from Bionic in early May.

One of the machines using Ubuntu packages for vagrant and VirtualBox, the other using upstream for both.

[Hartmut Holzgraefe (hartmut-php)]

Versions on the "Ubuntu only" machine:

vagrant/focal-updates,focal-updates,now 2.2.6+dfsg-2ubuntu3 all [installed]
virtualbox/focal-updates,now 6.1.10-dfsg-1~ubuntu1.20.04.1 amd64 [installed]

Even after purging the users .vagrant.d directory to get rid of all plugins
and to force re-download of the ubuntu/focal64 base box it gets stuck on startup.

Also tried a box version from end of May, where things definitely still worked,
can't get that started anymore either now.

[Hartmut Holzgraefe (hartmut-php)]

This base box on the other hand seems to work fine:

https://app.vagrantup.com/generic/boxes/ubuntu2004

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

It looks like the last published Vagrant image is 20200804.0.0, which is no longer among the last 5 daily builds.

Probably related, the simple streams metadata is also out of date, making it impossible to create 20.04 LXD containers from the repository.

[Éric St-Jean (esj)]

investigating

[Per Lundberg (perlun)]

For reference, I also get this with the 20200825.0.0 image version.

[John Chittum (jchittum)]

This is related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1874453 . We are still investigating the overall route we are taking with serial console connections in cloud images. However, there are workarounds available.

What happened in my test was a timeout on startup, with it hanging for quite a long time. Killing it took a similarly long time. However, adding in any serial file debug sped this up. As a workaround, you can use a change proposed:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/focal64"
  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    # Set a Null file handler for the serial console
    vb.customize [ "modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "file", File::NULL ]
  end

If you are running into something other than a timeout on startup (and eventually a complete hang of the machine), and adding in a serial bus logger to Null file doesn't solve the issue, please let us know.

[John Chittum (jchittum)]

Marked as a duplicate of #1874453. If you believe this is a different issue, please comment and let us know.

The fix is committed in devel, so Groovy images have no issues. The SRU process has begun for focal.