[vbox-dev] Custom gui frontend: custom ExtPack or other means of direct host/guest com?

[Ivo Smits]

Hi,

You can access/modify the framebuffer pointer without rebuilding 
virtualbox. You can use the COM API to open a VM, bind it to a session 
and run it (inside your own application). You can then use the 
Session.Console.Display.SetFramebuffer method to set an alternative 
IFrameBuffer interface implementation, which can provide a different 
memory pointer to VirtualBox.

On Windows systems, you have to run your frontend application from the 
VirtualBox directory, or copy a bunch of dll and other files from the 
VirtualBox directory to the application directory (setting the Path or 
current directory did not work for me). On Linux systems, you can either 
run everything as root, or make a call to RTR3InitAndSUPLib (in 
VBoxXPCOMC.so) as root and then drop privileges and set up the VM.

I've documented this (an alternative frontend in C#/.Net for Windows and 
Linux) on my blog: http://wp.ufo-net.nl/tag/virtualbox/ - where you can 
also find a link to my sourcecode.

I hope this helps.

--
Ivo

Op 14-10-2011 12:34, aep schreef:
> greetings,
>
> is there any documentation about building extension packs?
>
> The reason i'm asking is that i require to transfer the screen to a 
> different gui frontend, but the available means are all insufficient.
> Getting the framebuffer pointer requires rebuilding all of virtualbox 
> (as the security implementation won't let you run your own frontend by 
> default)
> Transfer over UDP doesn't work as udp networking is still unstable as 
> of vbox 4.1.4.
>
> So my next attempt would be to write a custom pci device and add it as 
> extension pack, but for that i cannot find documentation.
>
> Thanks!
>
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