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I tend to run newer kernels than most people, partially for fun, partially for bug testing, partially for masochistic fulfilment. A couple of days ago I installed 2.6.38-rc1 and VirtualBox's DKMS module would no longer compile.

I'm not new to VirtualBox throwing spanners in my kernel experiments but is there any way to make it compile?

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The new Kernel has moved linux/autoconf.h to generated/autoconf.h (hint). I don't really know the technical reasoning for this but anything that includes this in the VirtualBox host module source, needs editing.

Thankfully fixing it is just a case of swapping out the strings:

sudo find /usr/share/virtualbox/src/vboxhost -name '*.h' -exec perl -pi -w -e 's/linux\/autoconf/generated\/autoconf/g;' {} \;
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Of course this change might not be permanent in the Linux Kernel. Things could go back and that would squiffy your ability to compile in the future so if you need to do the opposite in the future, here it is:

sudo find /usr/share/virtualbox/src/vboxhost -name '*.h' -exec perl -pi -w -e 's/generated\/autoconf/linux\/autoconf/g;' {} \;
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup
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Use '*.h' instead of *.h to prevent the shell from expanding *.h. Furthermore, there is a sed command which can be used to do replacements, the -i option should be used to do inline replacements. If you use a character other than the / after s, you do not need to escape any occurences of /. The first command becomes sudo find /usr/share/virtualbox/src/vbox -name '*.h' -exec sed 's,linux/autoconf,generated/autoconf,g' -i {} \;. The second command can be altered in the same way. – Lekensteyn Jul 20 '11 at 19:29

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