VirtualBox Guest Drivers Still Working Their Way To The Mainline Linux Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 26 November 2017 at 11:22 AM EST. 13 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
While the VirtualBox DRM/KMS driver was merged for Linux 4.13 as one step towards improving the out-of-the-box support for Linux guests on Oracle VM VirtualBox, other drivers remain out-of-tree still, but that is slowly changing.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede has been working on getting the vboxguest driver merged to mainline Linux as the next step of improving VirtualBox guest integration.

Sent out on Sunday were the latest patches for vboxguest. This driver supports the Virtual Box Guest PCI device to allow for supporting features like copy-and-paste, the VirtualBox seamless mode, and OpenGL pass-through to work with the host system running this virtualization software.

Landing this VirtualBox driver is also a prerequisite for then getting the vboxsf kernel driver upstreamed for shared folder support.

This mainlining of the VirtualBox guest drivers is finally being done thanks to the resources of Red Hat and the VirtualBox developers finally declaring their ioctl API as being stable and to consider their user-space ABI stable and to only extend it in a backwards compatible manner.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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