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

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

On 17/09/16 21:52, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> Can you use the much more recent gcc in the dev-toolset-4
> repositories, which is in turn enabled by the the centos-release-scl
> and centos-release-scl-rh packages? It would mean using a customized
> koji or mock setup and activating a BuildRequires

No, we have to use the same compiler used for building the kernel. [1] 
The only way is to get the patch from the gcc 4.9 branch backported (it 
seems small in the diff, but I don't know how much different were the 
code bases of 4.8 and 4.9 by that time).  Even then, having kernels 
older than 3.11 is likely to remain a problem, if we insist on choosing 
this route to the Guest Additions.

I spent almost the entire last week investigating this, reading 
VirtualBox code and trying different things - probably a few days more 
in total, since I started.  I started reading Packer's intro Thursday 
evening, and the missing bits about its "virtualbox-iso" builder and the 
"vagrant" postprocessor the next morning. [2]  By the end of the day, I 
already had an automated, repeatable way of building Vagrant images for 
CentOS 6 and 7, based on our official kickstarts and our Netinstall 
ISOs, with the VirtualBox  Guest Additions preinstalled and fully 
working.  I'm much more inclined to go this way.  I'm not sure if it 
would be possible to use CBS, but I could use Jenkins to generate the 
images, by allocating a node to run VirtualBox and Packer natively. 
Would this be acceptable from others' perspective?

Would the SCL SIG be willing to also provide Packer, besides Vagrant? 
Right now, I'm downloading the Packer binary directly from upstream; for 
production purposes, I'd feel more comfortable with getting it from SCL.

Best regards,
Laurențiu

[1] 
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch12.html#ts_linux-kernelmodule-fails-to-load
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_holes