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    • raymac46
      Lots to chew on in your post and I don't disagree that Arch is probably the most "fundamental" Linux distro. That said, I don't think our root cause is distro-centric (since Arch and EOS run fine for *years* on the rails.) Nor is it VM-centric (since other distros and for that matter Windows work OK in VBox per se.) It has to be some combination of a bleeding edge distro that updates frequently over a worldwide set of mirrors AND an inherently quirky virtualization program with its guest utils and other "features." I think that combination will give more opportunities for Murphy's Law to apply. Now our next experiment in relativity will be to wait a week or so, let the updates pile up, and do a real Mother of an upgrade and see how it goes.    
    • Hedon James
      Cool!   Your shutdown/reboot of VMs blows my theory though....at least the way I presented it.  Obviously, re-syncing mirrors is having a positive effect.  Equally obvious, it's reasonable to conclude that out-of-sync mirrors were the cause of your issues.  The question is WHY they get out of sync, and I just don't know enough about Arch to say.  My best GUESS is that Arch ranks mirrors and they remain in that order, but the mirrors don't always sync in the same sequence/order, so the hierarchy of latest packages can shift?  And maybe that's because of your "unique" geographic location?   What we DO know, is that your Arch on metal doesn't have this problem.  I'm guessing this is because your bare-metal Arch is always on, and you're informed of package updates/upgrades in real-time, as pamac/octopi/pacman is informed of them.  Your VM, OTOH, is "down" for long periods of time (maybe hours, maybe days) when you shut it down.  At shutdown, your packages are up to date with your ranked mirrors.  During shutdown period, the mirrors update packages but don't sync simultaneously, or consistently.  Maybe Ottawa syncs every 24 hours, but nearby #2 mirror is less busy and syncs every 6 hours.  While Ottawa is mirroring package Foobar 2024.10.31 (which is a dependency for recently updated Program 2.1) updates have been pushed and the most recent package is Foobar 2024.12.06-2, which Ottawa won't receive until midnight tonite.  In the meantime, Ray updates today and gets the updated Program 2.1 package, but not the most recent dependency, as mirror syncs haven't been completely pushed; as a result his updated Program 2.1 breaks, because he doesn't have the most recent dependency Foobar 2024.12.06-2, which is a fix for the bug that breaks Program 2.1.  Tomorrow it wouldn't be a problem, but today it is.  In all fairness, tomorrow will be another package, as yet unknown.  At least that's my THEORY.  Maybe SB has other thoughts?   I started using the -Syyu flag almost immediately upon learning about Arch.  Perhaps that explains why I have never had an issue with Arch, regardless of whether it was in VB, or VMM?  The threads and articles I read suggest the "use case scenario" for these flags is when you SUSPECT corruption of repos on your system.  I didn't want to allow corruption in the first place, and could't see any reason why the -Syyu flag would cause harm in lieu of the -Syu flag.  I have seen users discourage the use of -Syyu as a default set of flags, as it uses up bandwidth and "clogs" the mirrors, especially if all users adopt that practice.  But I reasoned that I was using a VM and that I was only updating/upgrading 1x a month; maybe 2x if I'm ambitious; maybe every other month if forgetful; but averaging ONCE A MONTH.  In my mind, using the -Syyu flags may use more server bandwidth, but I'm still using less bandwidth per month than daily/weekly Arch upgraders.  I think you can see how I rationalized "hogging" bandwidth on occassion.  And apparently, that is the reason I have been able to farm an Arch VM for so long without issue?!  It had very little (nothing?!) to do with VB or VMM...it had everything to do with the pacman flags used to update/upgrade VMs on an infrequent basis?  Maybe SB has thoughts on this one also?   I enjoy learning more about Arch because it's "vanilla", and for that reason, I think Arch packages represent "baseline" or "normal" behavior.  The 'Buntus may behave like "this", and the Fedoras may behave like "that", but that's because of the mods that the distro maintainers make to those packages.  Gotta look to Arch if you know what the DEFAULT behavior is.  JMO...
    • securitybreach
      Of course, I had many issues.  
    • sunrat
    • raymac46
      Well..another update. This time some of the video stack, watched dracut rebuild the kernel modules, rebooted and everything was OK. This was the type of update that usually torched the VM. Maybe we are on to something. Pacman -Syyu FTW.
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