by zenomt » Sun Feb 26, 2017 1:16 pm
on a 2013 Mac Pro with 64GB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks. with O3X 1.6.1 installed and filesystems mounted (i didn't try with the ZFS drivers loaded but no pools imported), the VBoxDrv.kext (5.1.14 r112924 plus several earlier releases) wouldn't load. it printed out
supdrvGipCreate: failed to allocate the GIP page. rc=-71
-71 is VERR_MEMOBJ_INIT_FAILED. this error occurs in VirtualBox src/VBox/HostDrivers/Support/SUPDrvGip.cpp line 1881 of the 5.1.14 source tarball, after RTR0MemObjAllocCont() returns VERR_MEMOBJ_INIT_FAILED. RTR0MemObjAllocCont() is trying to allocate in the first 4GB of address space (presumably of physical memory in the kernel context). i don't believe it's trying to allocate all that much.
i tried repeatedly uninstalling and reinstalling VBox, including different versions, and also uninstalling/reinstalling O3X 1.6.1. the problem persisted. VBox loaded correctly after reverting to O3X 1.5.2.
i was curious what the "special case involving VMs" in lundman's post was referring to, and if it might be relevant for my situation. if nobody else is seeing this problem in later versions of Mac OS X, perhaps this is the push i need to upgrade. Mavericks is starting to get pretty stale. according to the O3X build-from-source instructions, it's too old (latest available Xcode for Mavericks is 6.2, 6.3+ is required to build).