[vbox-dev] VirtualBox Guest Additions on Linux 2.4

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Valentine,

Thanks for the bug report.  It is always helpful when people point out 
Linux distribution/kernel combinations which we should look at, since it 
is almost impossible to test all combinations "in the lab".  It should 
be fixed in the next release.

Regards,

Michael

Valentine Sinitsyn wrote:
> 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.