No Solaris desktop keyboard or mouse with mounted ISO

[spbarrett]

Successfully replicated in Windows 10 and Oracle Linux 7.9 hosts. If an ISO is mounted before starting a Solaris 11 VM in desktop mode the keyboard and mouse are not usable. This occurs regardless of whether the ISO is VirtualBoxGuest, boot, repo, or other. If the ISO is disconnected and then the VM started it can be attached an used. This appears to only occur with Solaris 11, currently using the CBE. Have tried multiple rebuilds using both the release repository and the repo created from the downloadable zip files. May somehow be related to the guest extensions not remaining active. Had to re-install extension on both Windows and Linux hosts after OS updates.

[paulson]

Can you provide further details on the steps required to reproduce this? Any special configuration details needed for the Solaris guest VM?

[paulson]

This appears to be a bug in Solaris, more specifically within the hald daemon on Solaris. There is an apparent race during startup between hald probing for devices at boot and those devices becoming visible at boot. I found that this issue isn't reproducible every time but probably occurs about 2/3rds of the time.

If this issue occurs and you're able to SSH in to the Solaris guest then running the following commands will restore mouse and keyboard functionality:

# svcadm restart hal
# svcadm retsart gdm

It is probably Oracle bugID 15786716.