I keep on my Windows laptop a virtual box running Ubuntu. Various Windows partitions are mounted and hence visible by the ubuntu virtual box. Linux software is actually stored on the windows file system, and perfectly executable within the virtualbox ubuntu.
That is until I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS. Now, Linux executables still run... BUT any attempt to start a second copy of a same program while one is already running fails. Actually, if I start a program - any program prog - in the background and I ls -l /windows_path/wherever/prog, the x flag has vanished (it comes back as soon as the running copy of prog has completed.) Thus, the failure to start several copies of prog in parallel is because the executable file is temporarily labeled "not executable" after it is first launched, and attempts to start another copy before the running one finished returns "Permission denied." This happens to ANY executable, be it compiled or shell script. I actually wrote a shell script containing the instruction to ls -l itself, ... and, (after chmod +x) starting it, indeed, it depicts itself as NON EXECUTABLE, while running!? Asking the script to chmod +x itself fails.
Does anyone know what's going on here? This never happened with ubuntu 18 in the same good old Oracle VirtualBox, and there were no changes on the windows host (neither was it due to a VirtualBox update). Neither did I touch the /etc/fstab after the update, it still goes like:
D_DRIVE /media/sf_D_DRIVE vboxsf uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,exec 0 0
E_DRIVE /media/sf_E_DRIVE vboxsf uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,exec 0 01 Answer
This sounds like VirtualBox bug 20320 which is supposed to be fixed in VBox version 6.1.22. Upgrade both host and the Guest Additions, since it's a shared folders problem.
1
