Re: VirtualBox Guest Drivers update

[Arto Huusko <armihu%gmail.com@localhost>]

[please CC me, I'm not on the list]

In reply to Greg:

you understood correctly: the code is built on NetBSD, and then
installed and used on NetBSD
that is running as a guest.

That being said, the patches contain a lot of code that is needed in
order to run a VirtualBox
host on NetBSD. I don't know how much more changes would really be
needed for that,
quite likely not a trivial thing, but a lot of kernel code is shared
between the host and guest code.

I think a problem with pkgsrc package is that the guest drivers are
kernel modules, and you
need kernel headers to build it (/usr/include is not sufficient). So
you need to get the headers
from target NetBSD version, and I have no idea how you would support
more than one
kernel version. Multiple packages? Options?

I looked at wip/virtualbox-ose, and it is the "correct" package, but
seems to contain only
FreeBSD patches. I guess it is a pkgsrc version of the FreeBSD port?
And it possibly also
builds the VirtualBox hypervisor, not just guest drivers.


In reply to Christos:

I really can't submit the code myself, because a lot of the code comes
from the NetBSD
GSOC that was done a few years back.
I think jym@ tried to submit the code to virtualbox on behalf of TNF
(or something), but I
guess it never went anywhere.
Please see the mailing list archives, the mails are in the thread that
starts from the
installation instructions mail I linked.

Arto