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

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Michael Vermaes <mvermaes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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-kernelmodule-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?

CentOS 7 ships open-vm-tools, so enabling the vmtoolsd unit should be enough.
Or am I missing anything?

> 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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