[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Guest Additions on Linux 2.4

[Valentine Sinitsyn]

Hi,

It's really nice to see Open Source would (at last!) gained decent
solutions for full virtualisation. :-) I'm using it on my laptop and
PC now, and one of them is running Linux 2.4 guest (it's Slackware
Linux 11 with kernel 2.4.33.3).

It appears that guest addition kernel modules fail to ciompile with
that kernel version. The problem is with
r0drv/linux/the-linux-kernel.h file (thus, it affects both vboxdrv
and vboxvfs. The problem is, this file defines jiffies-related
functions that are already defined in Linux 2.4 source. Expanding
#ifndef MAX_JIFFY_OFFSET up to below msec_to_jiffies function solves
the problem, but I'm not sure this will work with other 2.6 kernels <
2.6.7. It would be nice if someone investigated this issue further
and commit changes into SVN.

Next, install.sh script relies on udev to create /dev/vboxadd device,
which is obviously not the case for 2.4 guest which can't have udev
running. So install.sh should be creating device file via
mknod. It would be also a good idea not to use dynamic major number
for vboxadd device on 2.4 kernel since this will make manual creation
of the device node harder.

Linux 2.4 is claimed as oficially supported guest in VirtualBox so I
hope this bugs will be ironed out somewhere in a future.

P.S. It would be also nice to have a VirtualBox Bugzilla to post bugs
there, not in the devel list.

Regards,
Valentine Sinitsyn