Hello Greg, Arnd, Alexander, et al., Here is a first RFC version of my cleaned up version of the VirtualBox vboxguest and vboxsf guest drivers. This is an RFC because there are still some checkpatch and other small style issues which I need to fix. I'm posting this now because the majority of the major cleanup these 2 drivers needed before being suitable for mainlining has been done now and I believe the code is ready for a quick look by others (but not ready yet for a full review). I've removed all depenencies on vbox's OO-independent runtime and the runtime itself, reducing the vboxguest driver from 100000+ lines of code to aprox. 6500 and the vboxsf driver from 60000 lines to 5000. This reduces the non debug vboxguest.ko size from 450kB to less then 100 kB. I've also cleaned up various other warts such as doing hardware init in module_init rather then in a pci_probe callback. The vboxguest driver introduces a new userspace API + ABI in the form of ioctls on a character device. VirtualBox upstream not willing to commit to keeping this ABI stable was one of the things which has kept this driver driver out of mainline sofar. I've been talking to VirtualBox upstream about mainlining the guest drivers and VirtualBox upstream has agreed to consider the userspace ABI stable and only extend it in a backwards compatible manner. As said this is a RFC, the main comments I'm looking for is an answer to these 2 questions: Greg, Arnd would you be willing to merge the vboxguest driver under drivers/misc (in principle), assuming I do the remaining cleanup and the driver gets a favorable review of course ? Al, the same question for you for the vboxsf (shared folder) driver? Regards, Hans
