[CentOS-devel] Status report: packaging VirtualBox Guest Additions

Laurentiu Pancescu lpancescu at gmail.com
Sat Sep 17 07:01:01 UTC 2016


On 13/09/16 16:03, Laurentiu Pancescu wrote:
> The advice from #vbox-dev 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.

Over the last few days, I installed the Guest Additions in a Vagrant box 
and took a closer look at the installer.  The source for the kernel 
modules that it copies in /usr/src compiles without any issues on both 
CentOS 6 and 7 and doesn't even require kBuild like the regular build 
process.

Besides the kernel modules' source, the Guest Additions .iso delivers a 
few binaries, precompiled for i386 and x86_64, as well as a quite 
extensive runtime, implementing memory allocation, pseudo-random 
numbers, math routines, a crypto library, etc. [1]  We are unable to 
compile the userland on CentOS due to the unfixed bug in GCC 4.8 (which 
seems to be triggered by our own kernel headers, not the VirtualBox 
source), as well as having kernels older than 3.11.  Vagrant's check for 
the guest additions still passes if I remove the userland files, but the 
shared folders stop working - having just the kernel modules is not enough.

Regards,
Laurențiu

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/browser/vbox/trunk/src/VBox/Runtime/common


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