[vbox-dev] VirtualKD vs. VirtualBox

[Achim Hasenmüller]

Hi Ivan,

great stuff! That is very useful also for our engineers.

We do not allow external devices without modifications to VirtualBox sources because we haven't figured out the security policies yet. Virtual devices can access everything with system privileges so we need a policy to make sure this API is not used by malicious software. We are thinking about only allowing devices that are located in certain directories and have root access only.

I think it might be worth looking at integrating your code. Could you submit a patch under the MIT license as described on virtualbox.org? It should be turned off by default and enabled with a CFGM setting (i.e. via VBoxManage setextradata).

Thanks!

Achim.

On Jul 11, 2010, at 21:32 , Ivan Shcherbakov wrote:

> Dear VirtualBox developers,
> 
> My  name  is  Ivan  Shcherbakov.  I am the developer of VirtualKD - an
> open-source  tool  that  speeds  up kernel-mode Windows debugging with
> VirtualBox  by providing a direct kernel-to-debugger interface instead
> of  the  slow emulated COM port. The tool is widely used among Windows
> kernel developers.
> 
> As  I  did  not  find  a documented way of adding a custom device to a
> pre-compiled VirtualBox distribution, I had to hook the initialization
> of  the main driver package contained in VBoxDD.dll in order to add my
> custom device.
> 
> Is  there  a  better  way  of  adding custom devices to VirtualBox? In
> particular, I need my handler to be called when the OS kernel accesses
> some  particular  I/O  address in order to allow OS kernel to interact
> with my host-side code.
> 
> Would  it  also be possible to add the VirtualKD virtual device module
> to the main VirtualBox source tree and make it disabled by default, so
> that  users not using VirtualKD won't see any difference? VirtualKD is
> licensed  under  LGPL,  however,  I can release the VirtualBox-related
> part under the BSD license.
> 
> Looking forward to your reply.
> 
> -- 
> Best Regards,
> Ivan                          mailto:info at ivan-shcherbakov.com
> 
> 
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