Hi there,
I've started to work on packaging the VirtualBox Guest Additions. Unfortunately, the upstream build process doesn't work on CentOS Linux 6.8 and 7.2.
On 7.2 gcc fails on <linux/compiler.h> from the kernel-devel package (log attached as vbox-ga-c7.txt). I think this might be GCC bug #49718, fixed in January 2014 in the 4.9 branch. [1] With RHEL 7.3 in beta, would a backport of the fix to Red Hat's gcc-4.8 still be possible in a reasonable timeframe? Should I file a bug report against gcc on the CentOS tracker?
On 6.8 the compilation stops with an error later, while trying to build vboxvideo (log attached as vbox-ga-c6.txt). On #vbox-dev I was told that this directory requires at least kernel 3.11 to build, and it shouldn't even try. There seems to be no ./configure option for excluding vboxvideo from the build process.
Their advice is to install the Guest Additions in a VM using their installer on the .iso image they provide. This should leave all the necessary sources and Makefiles for building the kernel modules in /usr/src, which I could use for the RPMs instead of the original source (the source that their installer creates is able to detect what the guest supports, and will only build what's possible). As far as SRPMs go, this might be somewhat unusual... We'd need to do this for every new version, and we have to look into how package upgrades and removals could work.
Regards, Laurențiu