Vagrant on Ubuntu 20.04 (host) with older ubuntu on (guest)

Question

I'm on Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 (host) with kernel 5.4.0-74-generic.

VirtualBox Version 6.1.22 r144080

Vagrant: 2.2.16

Since some week I cannot run vagrant with older ubuntu-version as my guest system e.g.

$ vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64
$ vagrant up

Then I get the info and errors:

Got different reports about installed GuestAdditions version:
Virtualbox on your host claims:   5.0.18
VBoxService inside the vm claims: 5.1.38
Going on, assuming VBoxService is correct...

Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders. This is usually
because the filesystem "vboxsf" is not available. This filesystem is
made available via the VirtualBox Guest Additions and kernel module.
Please verify that these guest additions are properly installed in the
guest. This is not a bug in Vagrant and is usually caused by a faulty
Vagrant box. For context, the command attempted was:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=1000,gid=1000,_netdev vagrant /vagrant

The error output from the command was:

: No such device

If I start a vagrant box with focal instead.

$ vagrant init ubuntu/focal64
$ vagrant up

It works like a charm.

Any suggestions what I can do here to get this working again?

I don't know, but I think it has to do with a kernel update some when, but haven't had any luck downgrading the Linux Kernel.

Answer 1

This is not a really the answer, but ended up being my solution.

I took the struggle to get my old ubuntu 16.04 to get it updated to 20.04.

It was quite some work for me, so my suggestion is simply:

Keep your boxes up to date, so that you don't land in situations like this. :)