[vbox-dev] Windows 10 WDK/SDK and VCC 2019 toolset upgrade plans

[Ribhi Kamal]

Hello VirtualBox,
TL;DR; I noticed that there are attempts to get VirtualBox to compile using
VS2017. I was hoping that you would be so kind as to share with me your
plans (if any) to upgrade the tools for compiling VirtualBox for windows
hosts and which WDK, SDK, VCC are you planning to upgrade to. I'm
attempting to upgrade but to the latest of everything.

The long version.
About ~three month ago, a client reached out and requested that virtualbox
drivers have complete secure boot support on Windows 10. This meant going
through HLK since attestation did not provide complete support. Long story
short, I agreed to give it a shot.

After setting up the HLK environment, I used an already compiled OSE
version of virtualbox that I had on hand to do some basic testing to see
what kind of tests are failing. The results were promising considering that
I was using V4.2 that was compiled eons ago using vs2010.  Some failing HLK
tests required silly things like having a four digit version for the driver
(aka 6.1.8.0 vs 6.1.8) while others seemed to be way more involved. But the
following was obvious:
1- In order to pass HLK, a good reliable way was needed to bridge a
hostonly adapter to a physical nic. The version that I was using didn't
even have support for bridging on windows 10. My attempts to create a
tunnel between two virtual machines failed as packets would suddenly start
dropping. I believe this was an issue with vbox net service. So an upgrade
to virtualbox was needed to see if using virtualbox bridging will work.
2- The drivers must be compiled to target windows 10. Though, from
experience, I know that you can target windows 7 and above and still pass
the HLK and have a single driver that supports all.
3- The drivers must be compiled using the latest WDK.


I set out to work on the upgrade process with the hopes that I could get it
to work and either share with you what needs to be done or submit patches
(if you are interested). If and when I pass the HLK tests, I would share
with you my setup as well.

All the prerequisites compiled fine without any headache for both 32bit and
64bit using vs2019. The instructions for building them using vs2010 needed
small adjustments to make everything work.
Next was virtualbox. I pulled down the latest virtualbox tgz tarball at the
time (6.1.8) and started upgrading the tool sets.Then I started by
upgrading kbuild by adding an SDK, VCC and WDK kmk files and updated
configure.vbs to correctly detect the tool sets and configure kbuild. I was
starting to have some success when I noticed that kbuild already has
updated VCC and SDK (but no WDK). So I pulled these down and replaced the
work that I did with kbuild's and patched the files with any required
updates. Then I noticed that VirtualBox SVN source tree has already been
updated to the latest kbuild and new options were being added to support
VS2017 (I think). But I did not see any mention of the WDK, only the
Windows 8. Whatever was going on, it seemed like work in progress. So I
started to worry that everything that I'm doing is potentially a duplicated
effort. That's why I'm interested in knowing your upgrade roadmap if you
have one.

Currently, I feel like I'm very close to getting all the user mode binaries
to work. They currently compile but there are some linking issues that I'm
trying to address. The next obstacle is going to be the removal of selfsign
since it no longer exists in the WDK.


p.s. My main focus was to get the host drivers working first and then focus
on the guest additions. I didn't know there are guest additions that go as
far back as Windows NT!

Thanks and stay safe,
-- 
Ribhi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/attachments/20200625/61b36bbf/attachment.html>