Recently, I ran into VirtualBox bug #10077:APIC Bug. I wanted to help out so I had to enable console logging to my machine to give useful output. For that same reason, I started setting console=ttyS0 console=tty0 ignore_loglevel to kernel options in grub.cfg on my vagrant-baseboxes.

The apic bug did not occur on every startup so I had to do a lot of them before I got it right. This tempted me to get the console redirect feature of VirtualBox working from within a Vagrantfile. Well, in the end, it’s not that hard…

config.vm.define :base6 do |base_config|
    base_config.vm.customize [
      "modifyvm", :id, "--name", "CentOS 6 x86_64 Base",
      "--uart1", "0x3F8", "4", 
      "--uartmode1", "file", "/tmp/base6-console.log"
    ]
end

Note that this file gets overwritten every time you vagrant up your box. So if you want time stamped logs, you’ll have to introduce some magic (do let me know if you do ;))