Upgrading linux kernel in guest VMs results in Guru meditation

[Hans Joachim Desserud]

I'm running Virtualbox on Ubuntu 17.10 with several guest VMs. Not sure when it was introduced, but for a while I've been running into issues where the VMs refuse to start after upgrading them. Took me some time and experimentations, but it seems to be triggered by the linux kernel version in the VMs. It seems I'm able to upgrade any other packages, but when upgrading the kernel version (kernel, imagge and header packages), the VM will not start after a reboot.

For an example, this is the currently installed kernel on an Ubuntu bionic VM along with the available one which doesn't work:
$ apt policy linux-generic
linux-generic:
  Installed: 4.13.0.17.18
  Candidate: 4.15.0.10.11

Could possibly be something in kernel 4.15.x which Virtualbox doesn't like?

I first suspected this was an issue with the VM in question, but I've been able to reproduce this on VMs running Ubuntu bionic, 17.10 or Debian unstable. (I also had an Arch linux vm which in retrospect seems to have hit the same issue) This leads me to believe the issue is distro-independent.

When attempting to start the VM, it seems to load for a while (presumably until it starts loading the kernel), I get the following error message marked "Guru meditation":

"A critical error has occurred while running the virtual machine and the machine execution has been stopped.
For help, please see the Community section on https://www.virtualbox.org or your support contract. Please provide the contents of the log file VBox.log and the image file VBox.png, which you can find in the /home/wizard/VirtualBox VMs/bionic/Logs directory, as well as a description of what you were doing when this error happened. Note that you can also access the above files by selecting Show Log from the Machine menu of the main VirtualBox window.
Press OK if you want to power off the machine or press Ignore if you want to leave it as is for debugging. Please note that debugging requires special knowledge and tools, so it is recommended to press OK now."

Currently I'm working around the issue by holding back kernel upgrades in VMs, but I assume that new install of for instance bionic would ship with a too new kernel to work.

Let me know if you have any questions or requests for additional information.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: virtualbox 5.1.30-dfsg-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-36.40-generic 4.13.13
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-36-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity:Unity7:ubuntu
Date: Sun Mar 11 18:06:10 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-12-09 (1187 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" - Release amd64 (20141022.1)
SourcePackage: virtualbox
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2018-01-06 (64 days ago)

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

https://launchpad.net/~costamagnagianfranco/+archive/ubuntu/autoconf/+packages

Can you please try the one from there?