[vbox-dev] Ubuntu 15.04 carrying vbox modules in kernel

[Frank Mehnert]

Hi Ben,

On Thursday 12 February 2015 12:08:40 Ben Howard wrote:
> I am on the team that builds the Ubuntu Cloud and Vagrant Images. Over
> the last year or so we have watched projects like Vagrant and the
> user-experience of Ubuntu within Virtualbox. We want to improve the
> experience for users.
> 
> One area that we spotted for improvement is the DKMS modules. In
> general, while DMKS modules are a great solution, the dependency tree is
> huge (bloats an image by several hundred MB). As a result, we have
> decided to include the Virtualbox modules into our kernel.
> 
> There are several really good reasons for including the DKMS modules in
> the kernel. For our Vagrant users, including the modules in the kernel
> means that we can distribute small images. And for the new Ubuntu Core
> images, the Virtualbox userland can be Snap packaged.
> 
> We wanted to communicate this decision and gather any feedback.

of course having the kernel modules as part of the distribution is what
users want and need. The only reason why we didn't ask the distribution
maintainers is that we have frequent updates on the module source code
so we suggest to always have the same version of the kernel modules and
VirtualBox installed. VirtualBox a.b.c will usually not work with the
kernel modules x.y.z. Sometimes this works but there is no guarantee.
As we do frequent updates of VirtualBox we need to ship the kernel module
source as part of our VirtualBox package.

I'm aware that this should be much easier for you as you decide yourself
when to upgrade to a newer VirtualBox release. In that case you upgrade
both, the kernel modules and the VirtualBox package and it works.

Kind regards

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
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