virtualbox does not work with Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

[anuaimi]

After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.8, Virtualbox no longer works. The issue relates to starting a VM. During the boot process, the entire computer hangs and requires restarting. From looking on the forums, it looks like others are having this problem.

While it would be great to have this issue fixed, at a minimum, virtualbox should check if it is running on 10.8 and display a dialog saying that this is not supported (this is what vmware does). Then closer to the launch of 10.8, this issue could get resolved.

[sorin]

Some bug on OS X 10.8 DP2 and VirtualBox 4.1.12

[Frank Mehnert]

Just to update this ticket: This is still not fixed with VirtualBox 4.1.14, sorry. We are working on a fix. When we have something to test then we will provide a test build.

[Frank Mehnert]

Could you check if the test build from the Downloads page fixes your problems?

[pklaus]

I tested the new build (VirtualBox-4.1.15-77703) on OS X 10.8 (Developer Preview 3). When I tried to start Virtualbox, it said:

You can't use this version of the application VirtualBox with this version of OS X. You have VirtualBox 4.1.15.

I could, however, start VirtualBox by directly running it from Terminal like this:

/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtualBox

This enabled me to start VirtualBox successfully and also to run a virtual machine that was created with Virtualbox on the older OS X 10.7. It worked quite well - a little laggy maybe. I didn't test creating new virtual machines so far.

So the kernel panic is definitely gone! Thanks a lot!

[vasily Levchenko]

Replying to pklaus:

I tested the new build (VirtualBox-4.1.15-77703) on OS X 10.8 (Developer Preview 3). When I tried to start Virtualbox, it said:

You can't use this version of the application VirtualBox with this version of OS X. You have VirtualBox 4.1.15.

To avoid this message and able to lunch VirtualBox from Luncher.app or Finder.app you can alter /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/Exceptions.plist file.

[sorin]

I can also confirm that this new build seems to work on OS X 10.8 DP3

[Frank Mehnert]

Thanks for the feedback! And indeed, on Mac OS X, Mountain Lion Preview 3 you have to start the VirtualBox GUI from the command line. This is a temporary restriction from Apple.

[sorin]

Replying to frank:

Thanks for the feedback! And indeed, on Mac OS X, Mountain Lion Preview 3 you have to start the VirtualBox GUI from the command line. This is a temporary restriction from Apple.

Let's put it this way: this is a protection added by Apple to protect the OS from being crashed due to VIrtualBox. Now that the bug seems to be fixed, all you have is to increase the version number of the beta release of VIrtualBox to 4.2 to solve this problem. I cannot blame the Apple engineer that added 4.2 instead of 4.1.15 because they wouldn't expect you to fix the bug so soon :)

[Frank Mehnert]

Yes, i know. We are trying to convince Apple to lift the restriction for VBox 4.1.

[jgs]

is the diff for this new build available somewhere?

[Frank Mehnert]

The diff contains of several changesets. If you are really interested I can list them here. But you can also fetch the source code of VirtualBox 4.1.16 containing the fix. (4.1.16 is just about to be released.)

[Graham Perrin]

Replying to frank:

The fix in version 4.1.16 of VirtualBox seems effective with Build 12A206j of Developer Preview 3 of OS X 10.8.

(Command line and Exceptions.plist workarounds are not required.)

Big thanks to the developers.