[CentOS-devel] Packaging the VirtualBox Guest Additions?
Laurentiu Pancescu
lpancescu at gmail.com
Mon Aug 15 12:39:17 UTC 2016
We occasionaly get complaints from users that our official Vagrant
images do not include the VirtualBox Guest Additions. We do not include
them because the CentOS repositories do not have any package for
VirtualBox. Packaging it would probably require a significant amount of
work - the Debian source package shows quite a number of first-level
dependencies, probably not all already available in CentOS. [1] I'm
also not sure if packaging the full VirtualBox is even desirable. [2]
The alternative would be to package just the Guest Additions (which have
considerably fewer build dependencies), to be able to include them in
the Vagrant images. Two VirtualBox developers told me in #vbox-devel
that the source code already supports building just the Guest Additions,
and it's actually used for generating the official download images: one
should simply invoke "kmk VBOX_ONLY_ADDITIONS=1", or, I quote: 'kmk
VBOX_ONLY_ADDITIONS=1 packing to produce the ISO, which will only be for
one platform and bit count.' They also believe we should be able to get
away with simply providing the binary modules, since our kernels have a
stable ABI (the upstream Guest Additions ISO, as well as the Debian
packages, require DKMS and the development tools and kernel headers,
which would considerably increase the size of our Vagrant images). We
would probably need to incorporate some functionality from their
installer at RPM build time, to get just the binary modules.
Regards,
Laurențiu
[1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/virtualbox
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/6/317
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