VBox guest additions: status; second quarter goals

Blog post by scgtrp on Fri, 2011-06-17 01:49
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During the first few weeks of GSoC, I've gotten vboxsf, the shared folders module, mostly working, though I'm a bit behind where I'd like to be due to unexpected things repeatedly coming up both in physical-land and on my development setup. All supported functionality is working when accessed from the terminal - at this point I'm just optimizing and working on a bug where looking at a shared folder the wrong way in Tracker causes the kernel to panic. Mouse pointer integration, the other thing I had in my schedule for the first quarter, is now working; therefore finishing up the last few bits of vboxsf will be one of my main goals in the next few weeks.

The other goal I have now is time synchronization. It turns out this is more important than I thought - I didn't take into account how many things depend on timestamps being set to reasonable values, and my Haiku installation is at this point very confused as to what the current date and time are.

Several new features, including symlink support, were added in VBox 4, which I was completely unaware of until recently despite it having been released several months ago. I have now upgraded my laptop's copy of VBox so the Haiku port of the guest additions will be able to use these new features.

Comments

Re: VBox guest additions: status; second quarter goals

by Rox - 2011-06-17 03:33

Great to hear, this is one of the GSOC projects I personally find most useful, and shared folders is the most important part of this project for me. Also, in more general terms I think having Haiku work very seamlessly with a VM like VBox will make it easier to get developers to try out programming on Haiku (and hopefully get bitten). Other things like mouse pointer integration and clipboard sharing are also much appreciated.

Keep up the good work!

Re: VBox guest additions: status; second quarter goals

by Diver - 2011-06-19 14:37

I'm wondering if this guest additions would improve Haiku performance in VirtualBox. Currently Winodws XP is much faster and more responsive in vbox than Haiku. File operations are much faster too.

Re: VBox guest additions: status; second quarter goals

by Rox - 2011-07-01 11:40
Diver wrote:

I'm wondering if this guest additions would improve Haiku performance in VirtualBox. Currently Winodws XP is much faster and more responsive in vbox than Haiku. File operations are much faster too.

Yes you can write guest additions which allows you to utilize hardware acceleration and other performance improvements but I believe they are outside the scope of this GSOC project due to their complexity. That said it's not as if performance is terrible under VirtualBox as it is (Haiku is a very fast OS after all).

Anything that makes it easier for potential developers to get started with coding on Haiku is pure win in my book, and these guest additions helps alot in that regard.

Custom display resolution in VirtualBox

by Edwinr - 2011-07-05 15:20

This might not be the right place for this but it is also about VirtualBox so it might help someone looking for information about this. In the VirtualBox manual it's described how to set a custom VESA resolution for a virtual machine. This also works with Haiku: http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#idp13506112

I used the following command in a terminal to add the native screen resolution of my laptop to the list of resolutions in Haiku:

VBoxManage setextradata "Haiku" "CustomVideoMode1" "1280x800x32"

If VBoxManage doesn't work you can also add the following to the <ExtraData> section in the .vbox file of your virtual machine:
<ExtraDataItem name="CustomVideoMode1" value="1280x800x32"/>

Just change the resolution to the one you would like to use. Works for me :)

Re: VBox guest additions: status; second quarter goals

by Teknomancer - 2011-07-08 13:15

It would be great to have Haiku additions. Feel free to send us the patches once done and I can integrate it to the VBox tree. Of course, the Haiku kBuild patch would have to be integrated first.

Also if you have any questions or help with VirtualBox don't hesitate to ask us at #vbox on irc.freenode.org :) GL!!