Hi all, today VirtualBox started on a LFS host and i was able to start a VM with it. I'm definitely not saying it is fully functional, much more testing and bug fixing might be required for that. It is for sure not "production ready" yet as some errors are still there. It does not work to start machines using the GUI, but it is possible to start them using the CLI tool "VBoxManage". So i think its some kind of configuration issue, fundamently it seems that VBox is working.
To come to that status was my "hobby" over the last months. I'm so proud about it so that I need to bug you with my little success story ;-) All my LFS development happens in VBox-VMs which are currently run by an ArchLinux host system. Because I still dislike systemd*) and this host is the only Linux system which is not LFS, i accepted the challenge to replace it (by LFS). Since VirtualBox needs 32-bit support (and a printer driver for my laser also does) it was required to patch the LFS book in the way that the instructions will produce a multilib supporting tool chain. A patch set has been created which applies to recent LFS books and rendering can be parameterized to include/exclude multilib support. Thanks especially to DJ for supporting me here, keeping track on the systemd side and providing fixes on the patches. If interested, you find the patch at https://io.ax.lt/LFS/lfs/patch-multilib-SVN.diff The rest is more or less business as usual, many package to install, some compiled as 32bit-binaries too. Here the list of installed packages: Miscellaneous: which pcre zip unzip lynx sqlite db apr apr-util libtirpc pam cyrus- sasl subversion serf nano belfs***) libxml2 libgpg-error libgcrypt libxslt sgml-common docbook-xml docbook-xsl docbook-dsssl tidy shadow openssh ca-certs lib32-nettle**) icu libldap(=openldap) libunistring libtasn1 nettle p11-kit gnutls libidn2 curl libarchive X11: xorg-config util-macros xorgproto libXau libXdmcp xcb-proto libxcb libpng libuv cmake harfbuzz freetype fontconfig xorg-libraries xcb-util xcb-util-image xcb-util-keysyms xcb-util-renderutil xcb-util- wm xcb-util-cursor libdrm wayland wayland-protocols llvm-libs llvm MesaLib glu xbitmaps xorg-apps xcursor-themes font-util graphite2 xorg-fonts xkeyboard-config libxkbcommon pixman libepoxy xorg-server libevdev mtdev xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-synaptics xf86-video-ati xf86-video-intel xf86-video-vboxvideo xf86-video-vesa twm xterm xclock xinit QT: pcre2 alsa-lib yasm libjpeg-turbo libmng libinput pciutils postgresql- client freeglut libtiff libevent mariadb-client libogg libvorbis flac libsndfile dbus glib gobject-introspection libical bluez sbc pulseaudio cdparanoia libtheora gstreamer gst-plugins-base libusb lib32-libusb xmlto xdg-utils lib32-gnutls lib32-libtasn1 lib32-p11-kit lib32-libidn lib32-libunistring cups lib32-cups**) qt VBox: cdrtools libIDL iasl SDL libvpx libaio libdevmapper(=llvm) gsoap libvncserver opus VirtualBox So all in all (beside from core LFS) about 140 packages. Some pitfalls: 32bit support: I wasted a good amount of time to figure out why suddenly glibc no longer compiles in lib32 mode (gcc -m32). I searched and searched and even asked on mailing list... Well, i forgot that the kernel i run wasn't 32-bit enabled. Booting the right kernel, all was fine again. In kernel config, don't forget to set Executable file formats / Emulations ---> [*] IA32 Emulation < |M|*> IA32 a.out support [*] x32 ABI for 64-bit mode VirtualBox: Build instructions stolen from ArchLinux but compilation always crashed while compiling vboxwebservice with quite strange error messages. Finally i found out that 4GB RAM isn't enough, the OOM- killer canceled gcc. I increased my VMs size to 8GB and it compiled fine. A photo of LFS running a quite old and strange (but cool) operating system can be found here: https://io.ax.lt/LFS/lfs-vbox-1024.png That OS is called "EUMEL", developed somewhere back in the 80's, its primary programming language is ELAN which is also the language used at command line. It is a multiuser and multitask OS running on Z80 CPUs before it was ported to x86. Again, this VBox on LFS is by far not running well atm. VirtualBox GUI starts fine and it presents me all my VMs but i cannot start them within the GUI. To start VMs i have to use "VBoxManage startvm <name>". But all in all i think the whole story shows that with LFS everything is possible ;-) Btw, there is no Python2 at all on this machine, everything compiles fine with Python3. -- Thomas *) don't want to start any discussions about this here as I do not really have other "arguments" than "don't like it" atm. I'm not able to argue on a technical basis... **) for the Dell printer driver ***) my own pkgmngr inspired by pacman. Just set up to see how package management will work (or not) -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
