Whonix VMs (Gateway + Workstation) hang at black screen during boot under VirtualBox 7.2.10 on Windows 11 with active VBS/HVCI (NEM mode)

[arraybolt3]

@whobart

I have never encountered the “green turtle” issue, and I have already gone through the Kicksecure documentation.

Are you sure? “Native Execution Mode” (as described by your post above) is the “green turtle” issue. The wiki does state…

If the VirtualBox green turtle indicator is not shown, and you’re still experiencing issues, then it’s a different issue.

…but it’s possible that this is incorrect and that VirtualBox might try to go through Hyper-V without showing the green turtle icon.

The main way I’ve been able to get Whonix VMs to boot while keeping VBS enabled is to only start one VM at once. If you start only Whonix-Gateway, then wait for it to boot all the way to a desktop, then start Whonix-Workstation, things seem to work well enough in my experience.

@whobart

However, during the boot process I see the following message:

[FAILED] Failed to start systemd-modules-load.service - Load Kernel Modules

You probably have UEFI and Secure Boot enabled within the VM this is occurring on. If so, open the VM settings and disable Secure Boot (or better yet, switch to BIOS firmware). If you have to use UEFI but Secure Boot isn’t enabled, try enabling Secure Boot, then disabling it (just in case VirtualBox is mistakenly enabling it and not showing it for some reason).

EDIT: The module load issue is probably not a problem with Secure Boot at all. See:

Bug report, module tirdad fails to load

This is very, very good info to have! That looks like Debian’s kernel has changed in a way incompatible with the existing Tirdad code, and we’ll have to update it.