Sun Microsystems VIRTUALBOX 3.0.0 - Manual (Page 153)

11 Troubleshooting
Replace 85 with the group ID that matches your system (search /etc/group for “usb”
or similar). Alternatively, if you don’t mind the security hole, give all users access to
USB by changing “664” to “666”.
The various distributions are very creative from which script the usbfs filesys-
tem is mounted. Sometimes the command is hidden in unexpected places.
For SuSE 10.0 the mount command is part of the udev configuration file
/etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules
. As this distribution has no user group
called usb, you may e.g. use the vboxusers group which was created by the
VirtualBox installer. Since group numbers are allocated dynamically, the following
example uses 85 as a placeholder. Modify the line containing (a linebreak has been
inserted to improve readability)
DEVPATH="/module/usbcore", ACTION=="add",
RUN+="/bin/mount -t usbfs usbfs /proc/bus/usb"
and add the necessary options (make sure that everything is in a single line):
DEVPATH="/module/usbcore", ACTION=="add",
RUN+="/bin/mount -t usbfs usbfs /proc/bus/usb -o devgid=85,devmode=664"
Debian Etch has the mount command in /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh. Since
that distribution has no group usb, it is also the easiest solution to allow all members
of the group vboxusers to access the USB subsystem. Modify the line
domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev
so that it contains
domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=85,devmode=664
As usual, replace the 85 with the actual group number which should get access to
USB devices.
Other distributions do similar operations in scripts stored in the /etc/init.d di-
rectory.
11.5.8 PAX/grsec kernels
Linux kernels including the grsec patch (see http://www.grsecurity.net/ ) and
derivates have to disable PAX_MPROTECT for the VBox binaries to be able to start a
VM. The reason is that VBox has to create executable code on anonymous memory.
11.5.9 Linux kernel vmalloc pool exhausted
When running a large number of VMs with a lot of RAM on a Linux system (say 20
VMs with 1GB of RAM each), additional VMs might fail to start with a kernel error
saying that the vmalloc pool is exhausted and should be extended. The error message
also tells you to specify vmalloc=256MB in your kernel parameter list. If adding this
parameter to your GRUB or LILO configuration makes the kernel fail to boot (with
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