VirtualBox 7.2.2 fails to start VMs

After a recent upgrade to VirtualBox 7.2.2, all of my many VMs would crash within seconds as they tried to start. While this isn’t exactly a new problem symptom — I’ve had similar experiences in the past — the fix is quite a bit different. I’ve employed several different methods to recover from those past issues, however, this one required a more blunt force trauma type of approach.

In many of those previous cases, it’s been a simple matter of running the akmods command and restarting VirtualBox to load the recompiled kernel modules. In another case I had to remove the current version of VirtualBox, as well as all of the kernel modules. It seems that VirtualBox doesn’t clean up after a new version is installed, so many older kernel modules continue to reside on the host. You can see that in the results of this command.

# dnf remove kmod-VirtualBox*
Package                                  Arch    Version           Repository                    Size
Removing:
kmod-VirtualBox-6.15.10-200.fc42.x86_64 x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      @commandline             211.4 KiB
kmod-VirtualBox-6.15.9-201.fc42.x86_64  x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      @commandline             211.2 KiB
kmod-VirtualBox-6.16.3-200.fc42.x86_64  x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      @commandline             211.5 KiB
kmod-VirtualBox-6.16.4-200.fc42.x86_64  x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      @commandline             211.7 KiB
Removing unused dependencies:
VirtualBox-kmodsrc                      noarch  7.1.12-1.fc42      rpmfusion-free-updates   968.9 KiB
VirtualBox-server                       x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      rpmfusion-free-updates    88.1 MiB
akmod-VirtualBox                        x86_64  7.1.12-1.fc42      rpmfusion-free-updates    48.6 KiB
akmods                                  noarch  0.6.0-9.fc42       fedora                    64.2 KiB
fakeroot                                x86_64  1.37.1-1.fc42      fedora                   154.8 KiB
fakeroot-libs                           x86_64  1.37.1-1.fc42      fedora                   124.6 KiB
kmodtool                                noarch  1.1-13.fc42        fedora                    27.6 KiB
liblzf                                  x86_64  3.6-32.fc42        fedora                    49.5 KiB
libtpms                                 x86_64  0.10.1-1.fc42      updates                    1.0 MiB
python3-progressbar2                    noarch  4.5.0-1.fc42       fedora                   568.1 KiB
python3-rpmautospec                     noarch  0.8.1-11.fc42      updates                  416.6 KiB
python3-rpmautospec-core                noarch  0.1.5-3.fc42       fedora                    10.7 KiB
python3-utils                           noarch  3.9.0-2.fc42       fedora                   224.0 KiB
rpmdevtools                             noarch  9.6-9.fc42         fedora                   213.8 KiB

Transaction Summary:
Removing:          19 packages

The problem

This new problem occurred after I upgraded to VirtualBox 7.2.2. The VirtualBox Managers starts as it should but all of the VMs I tried to launch resulted in the following error.

VBoxManage: error: HM ring-0 init failed: VERR_NOT_AVAILABLE (VERR_NOT_AVAILABLE)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component ConsoleWrap, interface IConsole

I tried a couple the old tricks with no success, and then did a search on the first line of the error. It appears that many, if not all users of VirtualBox that have installed the latest upgrade are experiencing the same problem. Fortunately, the fix was also reported.

Regression

In this latest problem after upgrading to version 7.2.2, it is necessary to completely remove all vestiges of older versions, and revert to VirtualBox 7.2.0. You can obtain that from the old builds section of the Oracle VirtualBox site. This version is no longer supported, but it does get things running again.

I hope this helps.