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

Johnny Hughes

johnny at centos.org
Mon Sep 19 16:08:15 UTC 2016


On 09/17/2016 02:52 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 3:01 AM, Laurentiu Pancescu <lpancescu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
> 
> 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
> 

That would mean that running it may (probably likely) require newer
components that in the standard C7 release.

If it does, then we would need to build with the standard packages as
well, since I suspect more people need el7 vagrant boxes that run
on/with standard c7 than ones that run on/with scl enabled gcc/glibc, etc.


>> passes if I remove the userland files, but the shared folders stop working -
>> having just the kernel modules is not enough.
>>


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