Hi, On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:09 PM, Alexander von Gluck <[email protected]> wrote: > After a summer of hard work, our Google summer of code student completed his > work on the VirtualBox guest additions for Haiku. > [...] > We feel the code should be up to the VirtualBox standards. Please let me > know if anyone has any questions > or if I need to complete any tasks.
This is really great work and it's good to hear that porting the guest additions has been done without too much trouble by someone other than core VBox developers. I feel I might just be able to do something similar for improving the situation with Mac OS X guests. I've already developed a Mac OS X driver for the paravirtualised network adapter (virtio-net) which can be found here https://github.com/pmj/virtio-net-osx [1] But after digging through some of the VirtualBox source code to figure out how the other devices work, I ended up being a bit overwhelmed. My understanding is that there are a few layers on the guest side: - there's a virtual PCI device which seems to indicate the presence of a VBox host ("VBoxGuest") - "HGCM" seems to be some kind of low-level Host-Guest communication layer - VBoxGuestLib seems to be a kernel-mode library for the various different services that sits on top of HGCM and/or the PCI device (?) - OS-Specific glue to connect the services with the OS APIs (vfs, etc.). I haven't been able to find any documentation to confirm this guess, or for maybe giving a rough overview of how these systems work and what needs to be done for porting to a new OS. Does such documentation exist? And if not, would anyone who's done such a port (such as the Haiku one) be willing to write a quick overview? Thanks, phil [1] It works well (faster than the emulated Intel gigabit device), but I'm having some stability issues that take down the host under high load when TCP segmentation offloading is enabled, so you might want to disable offloading in the info.plist - set PJVirtioNetAllowOffloading to 'NO' in the VirtioNet IOKitPersonality. _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
