[CentOS] Failed to load SELinux policy- freezing

Thu Dec 5 19:40:28 UTC 2019
Bill Gee <bgee at campercaver.net>

This is annoying!  I have a CentOS7 virtual machine running on VirtualBox.  Short version:  At boot the system locks with a message:

"Failed to load SELinux policy, freezing."

VirtualBox thinks it is still running, and I can see it consuming a small amount of CPU time.  But it never goes past this message.

The problem actually started with a problem in the sound system on this virtual machine.  It would boot a ways through, then abort with no warning and no message.  It just went away.  Looking at the VirtualBox log file, I saw that the last line in the file was something about failing to initialize a stream associated with PulseAudio.  In VirtualBox settings for the machine I disabled all audio.  It then booted.

I was in the process of gathering information for a problem report at VB when it started giving the message about SELinux policy.  There were several aborts including one where it almost got to loading the X server and going graphical.

SELinux is disabled on the computer, so I don't understand why it is even trying to load a policy.

Is there a kernel parameter I can give it to stop SELinux?  Is there any other way to get past this message?

-- 
Bill Gee