Hi all, On 8/16/23 19:02, Ira Weiny wrote: > Hans de Goede wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On 8/16/23 13:45, Sumitra Sharma wrote: >>> On Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 09:28:51AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: >>>> Hi Sumitra, >>>> > > [snip] > >>> >>> Hi Hans, >>> >>> Can you please specify what you mean by "vbox guest functionality"? Are you talking about the guest addition utilities which VirtualBox offers and about which you warned not to install them? [*] >> >> Yes. >> >> Virtualbox consists of 2 parts: >> >> 1. The hypervisor / hw-emulator on which virtual-machines run. This hypervisor itself runs on the host. >> >> 2. The guest addition utilities which can be installed inside a guest / virtual-machine running on top of VirtualBox. These allow things like copy and pasting between the guest and host and sharing a folder on the host with the guest. >> >> The host always uses out of tree kernel-modules. > > Hans, > > Thanks for this clarification. This is my fault for leading Sumitra to > believe that the in tree modules could replace the guest additions for the > VirtualBox hypervisor. Actually the in tree modules can replace the *guest* kernel modules which are shipped with the guest additions from virtualbox. >> The guest can use the in tree kernel modules. >> >>> How can I make the in-tree vbox modules run? >> >> You can use these and specifically the vboxsf and vboxguest modules by >> installing Fedora 38 Workstation x86_64 as a virtualbox *guest* / inside >> a virtualbox vm and then share a folder on the host with the guest. >> > > I took your original email to mean that some in tree modules could be out > of sync with the interfaces used by code coming from Oracle. > > I'm curious are there also out of tree modules for the guest support? Yes the guest-additions contain out of tree modules (1). Since Sumitra plans to work on the in tree modules, those should NOT be installed. The easiest way to avoid installing the out-of-tree guest modules is to just not install the official guest additions at all. Fedora comes with pre-packaged guest additions which only contain the (FOSS) userspace parts, relying on the in tree vbox guest kernel modules. Regards, Hans 1) When I worked on mainlining the guest modules the idea/hope as that virtualbox upstream would switch to the in tree version, at least when the guest has a new enough kernel. But unfortunately this never happened.
