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

[Michael Vermaes]

On Tuesday, 20 September 2016, Laurentiu Pancescu <lpancescu at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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-kernelm
> odule-fails-to-load
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_holes
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For what it's worth, we had been using Packer to build CentOS Vagrant boxes
from the templates provided at https://github.com/chef/bento until
recently, as there wasn't an 'official' CentOS box for the VMware
provider. Since I am currently working on using Packer's vmware-vmx builder
to repackage your new VMware box to include the VMware Tools (the VMware
equivalent to the Virtualbox guest additions), I would be interested to
know if you would pursue a similar approach (using Packer) for VMware?

I realise this is a bit off-topic for your current issue with Virtualbox,
but it would be great to have the official CentOS Vagrant boxes well
supported under both Virtualbox and VMware.

Let me know what I can do to assist in this.
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