[haiku-development] RFC: GSOC 2011 VirtualBox guest additions added to official optional packages?

  • From: Alexander von Gluck <kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:23:39 -0500

I've thrown together optional packages for the VirtualBox guest additions based on the hard work

of Mike Smith during the 2011 Google Summer of Code.

Whats done:
  * Mouse Integration -- works perfectly
  * Shared folders -- works perfectly
  * Shared clipboard -- working well
  * VirtualBox video -- works, incomplete
  * VirtualBox tray application

VirtualBox video:
Mike had every expectation to complete this, however it was discovered that updating only certain screen regions wasn't a feature in the app_server (and is required by the VirtualBox 2d acceleration layout). The functions in the accelerant have been written and stubbed out to make implementing this easy in the future. Mike pushed on and did
  complete the dynamic resizing of the screen.

GCC4:
A gcc4 Haiku build is a requirement as Mike was trying to get gcc2 working up until the end of the coding session... however was unable to get it working without crashing.

I have put together two packages to make showing off the code to the VirtualBox team
and the Haiku community easy...
http://pub.haikufire.com/haiku/optionalpackages/vboxadditions-4.1.15_dev-x86-gcc4-2011-08-23.zip http://pub.haikufire.com/haiku/optionalpackages/vboxadditions-full-4.1.15_dev-x86-gcc4-2011-08-23.zip

the -full one includes the VirtualBox video driver, it isn't recommended though as without
  2d acceleration, the vesa driver is much faster.

Mikes sources can be found here:
  https://github.com/scgtrp/vbox-haiku/



-------------------------------------------------------

Does anyone have any reservations on adding the vboxadditions package to the official optional package list?

Adding it as an official (cough...gcc4) optional package will make testing easier and allow us to get the code in-font of VirtualBox developers in a working state while making our case to include Mikes code in the
VirtualBox source tree.

Adding it as an optional package would allow its installation via 'installoptionalpackages -a vboxadditions'
on nightly gcc4 images.

Thanks!
 -- Alex

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