[vbox-dev] Developing Guest Additions for MINIX

[Frank Mehnert]

Andrew,

On Sunday 25 April 2010, Andrew Huffman wrote:
> I'm a grad student studying computer science and we've been assigned by our
> professor to develop guest additions for MINIX. The professor stated this
> project would be "exploratory" and may not actually be completable. My
> partner and I have been looking everywhere for guidance for developing
> guest additions but it just doesn't seem to exist. Are there *any*
> resources which can aid in developing guest additions on VirtualBox? Is it
> even possible?
>
> We've been looking through the source files here:
> http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Additions
>
> However, it isn't the easiest to read these source files and really
> understand what's going. If anyone could maybe give us some guidance on how
> to possibly go about this that'd be great. Does anyone have experience in
> developing onto VirtualBox? If so, how'd you go about it?

guest additions for VirtualBox contain usually of two parts: The
guest kernel-level drivers for communication with the host and
guest userland applications making use of the services provided
by the guest kernel-level drivers.

The startpoint for developing VBox guest additions is

http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/common/VBoxGuest

and

http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/common/VBoxGuestLib

VBoxGuest is the guest kernel-level driver.

Maybe you want to start understanding the implementation for Linux,
VBoxGuest.cpp (the common part for all supported OSes) and VBoxGuest-linux.c.

The next step would be to have a look into

http://www.virtualbox.org/browser/trunk/src/VBox/Additions/common/VBoxService

which is the guest userland service providing time synchronization,
guest statistics and so on.

Sorry, but there is no written documentation so you have to go through the
source code.

Kind regards,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert

Sitz der Gesellschaft:
Sun Microsystems GmbH, Sonnenallee 1, 85551 Kirchheim-Heimstetten
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