VirtualBox Shared Folder Driver Seeks Inclusion In Linux 5.6

After being added to Linux 5.4 and then being ejected a week later when it was clear not enough testing took place, the VirtualBox Shared Folder "VBOXSF" driver is now trying to make it into Linux 5.6.

Al Viro sent in the VBOXSF driver on Saturday though as of writing Linus Torvalds hasn't yet pulled it in. Since its dismissal from Linux 5.4, this VirtualBox driver has seen more testing and fixes.

The driver is more than three thousand lines of code. As with the other VirtualBox drivers that have been mainlined to the Linux kernel in recent times, it's not Oracle engineers working on it but sadly other upstream developers seeking to improve the out-of-the-box Linux guest support for this virtualization platform.

The VBOXSF driver allows for folders exported by the host to be mounted under Linux and leverages IPC functions already provided by the existing VirtualBox guest Linux kernel driver. This driver for Linux 5.6 is a cleaned up and improved copy of what Sun/Oracle has been carrying for years as an out-of-tree module.