[vbox-dev] VBox Device - Host Driver communication

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Nicolay Vizovitin wrote:

> I'm a student and I'm trying to create new VirtualBox device, specifically 
> a network interface. The project requires this NIC to communicate with 
> host OS
> driver. 
> Though I develop for Windows, my natural willing is to use some kind of 
> generic 
> way to interface with the host driver. Most of all I'm interested in 
> ability 
> to do IOCtl's. So, I wonder if there is such API in VirtualBox (kind of 
> IPRT 
> thing, I guess) ?

Device emulations in VirtualBox - especially if they need to do ioctls - 
are regular user level programs. And since ioctls are by definition 
completely specific to the host OS and the driver in question there is 
no IPRT support for this. But as your device is inherently OS specific 
there's probably nothing wrong with just doing the ioctls you need.

May I ask what kind of network interface this is? Because many network 
interfaces can be used through the existing networking support.

Klaus