Porting VirtualBox to a New Platform

VirtualBox is designed with portability in mind and portability issues are addressed as they are uncovered. That said, it still requires a fair amount of work to get most of the features up and going on a new platform. The effort needed varies a bit depending on how much the new platform differs from the ones VirtualBox already has been ported to. For instance, the Mac OS X differs from Linux/GNU and Windows in object format, linker/assembler, user/kernel address space layout, and naturally the kernel, which means a lot of work. On the other hand, take !FreeBSD, the only major difference is the kernel, so porting VirtualBox to !FreeBSD should be a picnic compared to Mac OS X.