Mario, On 13.08.2014 00:22, Mario Lobo wrote: > Klaus; > > Hijacking the topic a bit, what would be required (technically and > "licensingly") to implement these basic pci passthrough > functionalities on the ose source (freeBSD in particular), specially > for using it on sound cards?
As you probably know there's currently a partially working PCI passthrough implementation available, for Linux host only. A part of the infrastructure and the Linux kernel part are open source, the rest is closed. It is only functional if the Oracle VM VirtualBox extension pack is installed containing the binaries of the closed portion. So what you're asking for is either open sourcing the complete functionality or providing a fully functional extension pack for FreeBSD, and both options need convincing our management in some way or another. The first one is a rather tough task, because the closed source extension pack is currently the only way we have to make money. For some reason no one seems interested in paying for support for the GPLed product... everyone who can get away without the extension pack takes the free ride (and probably later creates tickets in the public bug tracker, complaining about loss of business). Creating an extension pack for FreeBSD would similarly increase our effort/cost (and imply fully supporting FreeBSD as a host), without an immediately obvious way to compensate this by increased sales. The licensing question is simply a non-issue. This leaves only the technical aspects. In principle only the kernel module portion of the functionality needs porting to FreeBSD. This is something the FreeBSD community could investigate/implement. Everything else should be portable code, with at most very minor need of platform dependent tweaks. Overall - doable, but I'm skeptical that either of the two options for "closing the gap" will be greeted with enthusiasm by the necessary people. > Thanks, > > P.S. - Sorry for top-posting but it seems to be the trend on this list. > Not so sure :) Klaus _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
