F28 Self Contained Change: VirtualBox Guest Integration

[Jan Kurik]

= Proposed Self Contained Change: VirtualBox Guest Integration =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/VirtualBox_Guest_Integration

Change owner(s):
* Hans de Goede <hdegoede AT redhat DOT com>

VirtualBox is popular, easy to use virtual-machine software. The
purpose of this change is to ship the VirtualBox guest-drivers and
-tools by default in the Fedora workstation product.


== Detailed Description ==
VirtualBox runs on Windows. MacOS and Linux and is used by many users
to try it Linux for the first time. As such it is important for Fedora
to work well in VirtualBox virtual-machines. Like other
virtual-machines VirtualBox virtual-machines can offer an enhanced
user-experience when some VirtualBox specific guest-drivers and
guest-tools are installed. This change is about adding the
guest-drivers to the Fedora kernel package, packaging the
userspace-tools (VirtualBox Guest Additions) and adding the VirtualBox
Guest Additions package to the default package list for the
Workstation product.


== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:
- The VirtualBox guest drivers have been merged into linux-next and
will be in 4.16, the kernel-release with which F28 will ship. The
separate vboxsf kernel-driver has been submitted upstream and is
awaiting review upstream. If the vboxsf driver does not get accepted
upstream in time we can ship with VirtualBox guest integration without
shared-folder support.
- Package VirtualBox Guest Additions userspace parts (Review Request)
- Add VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list
for the Workstation product

* Other developers:
N/A (not a System Wide Change)

* Release engineering:
https://pagure.io/releng/issue/6880

* List of deliverables:
N/A (not a System Wide Change)

* Policies and guidelines:
N/A (not a System Wide Change)

* Trademark approval:
N/A (not needed for this Change)
-- 
Jan Kuřík
Platform & Fedora Program Manager
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkynova 99/71, 612 45 Brno, Czech Republic

[Sérgio Basto]

Hi,

On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 14:16 +0100, Jan Kurik wrote:
>  - Add VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list
>  for the Workstation product 
I don't understand this one, VirtualBox Guest should *only* be
installed in an virtual machine .

Today VirtualBox-server conflicts with VirtualBox-guest-additions and
vice versa . 

I also propose the patch attach, to don't let install VirtualBox-guest-
additions in host systems, at the time could break the Xorg graphics
and all windows managers . 
Furthermore at least is just a waste of disk space, for non virtual
machines and for who don't use VirtualBox. 

More information about this question in [1]. in the bug report is also 
addressed the issue of install VirtualBox server under one virtual
machine that is already running under a Virtualbox . 

[1]
https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3425#c18


Best regards.
-- 
Sérgio M. B.

[Michael Catanzaro]

>  On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 14:16 +0100, Jan Kurik wrote:
>  
>  I don't understand this one, VirtualBox Guest should *only* be
>  installed in an virtual machine . 
Workstation already installs guest support for all major virtualization systems *except*
VirtualBox by default: hyperv-daemon, open-vm-tools-desktop (VMWare), qemu-guest-agent,
and spice-vdagent (GNOME Boxes). It's a shame that only VirtualBox is not supported.
It would be nice to change this, so that users do not have to install anything to make
Fedora work well in VirtualBox, as is already the case for all other major virtualization
platforms.

>  Today VirtualBox-server conflicts with VirtualBox-guest-additions
> and
>  vice versa . 
>  
>  I also propose the patch attach, to don't let install VirtualBox-guest-
>  additions in host systems, at the time could break the Xorg graphics
>  and all windows managers . 
>  Furthermore at least is just a waste of disk space, for non virtual
>  machines and for who don't use VirtualBox.  
I don't know anything about this, but of course if it's broken, then we obviously
can't do it....

Hopefully the disk space use is insignificant?

Michael

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 02:03:17PM +0000, Sérgio Basto wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 14:16 +0100, Jan Kurik wrote:
>  > - Add VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list
>  > for the Workstation product
>  
>  I don't understand this one, VirtualBox Guest should *only* be
>  installed in an virtual machine .
>  
>  Today VirtualBox-server conflicts with VirtualBox-guest-additions and
>  vice versa .  
That's the root of the problem. And the fix is to make those packages
smarter, so that they don't cause issues if they are present on a system
where they are not useful. In https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3425#c14
Nicolas Chauvet gives a few good hints, e.g. to use udev rules to load
the module conditionally. If this approach is not possible, it would
even be possible to remove any automatic loading of the module and write
a simple service that does some arbitrary checks and only loads the module
after that.

>  I also propose the patch attach, to don't let install
> VirtualBox-guest-
>  additions in host systems, at the time could break the Xorg graphics
>  and all windows managers. 
I'm sorry, but I think that this is a terrible approach. Breaking an
rpm transaction is hard on users, for example because it will break
offline upgrades, and leave users in a state where they cannot recover
easily.

Having Conflicts between packages is slightly better, because the
transaction will be aborted before it starts, but is also quite bad.

Such approaches should be a thing of the past. For many years it has
been expected that you can take one image and boot it as a container,
a VM, a notebook, or a server, and have it boot correctly in all
cases. Any service or driver which breaks this assumption should be
considered buggy.

Please find a way to make it possible to have both guest and server
rpms installed, and enabled by default (in the sense that they'll be
active under the right virtualization, and be a noop otherwise). In
particular such flexibility is necessary to be able to treat virtualbox
virtualization as all others, and, for example, to distribute a single
guest image that will be fully useful in all virtualization implementations.

>  Furthermore at least is just a waste of disk space, for non virtual
>  machines and for who don't use VirtualBox. 
This is insignificant.

>   %pre guest-additions
>  +if [ $(systemd-detect-virt | grep -iP "oracle|kvm" -c) -eq 0 ]; then
>  +echo "This package it is only to install in one Oracle VM VirtualBox."
>  +echo "You are trying install VirtualBox guest-additions but it hasn't been \
>  +detected that your system is running in a VirtualBox virtualization, so we \
>  +forced the installation to fail."
>  +exit 1
>  +fi 
No no no. We want generate an image and use it in multiple virtualization
implementations. This approach would require that a vbox image is created
under virtualbox, please don't require that.

Zbyszek

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 02:03:17PM +0000, Sérgio Basto wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 14:16 +0100, Jan Kurik wrote:
>  > - Add VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list
>  > for the Workstation product
>  
>  I don't understand this one, VirtualBox Guest should *only* be
>  installed in an virtual machine . 
Sort of.  For VMware, the guest tools (open-vm-tools) are in a special
comps group ‘platform-vmware’ which Anaconda uses when installing on
VMware.  (There is also a comps group containing all guest agents)

In addition the service files use systemd
‘ConditionVirtualization=vmware’ so the service should not start up
unless VMware is detected at run time.

>  Today VirtualBox-server conflicts with VirtualBox-guest-additions
> and
>  vice versa .  
This sounds right, unless nested virtualization is expected to work
(in which case a layer might be both a hypervisor and a guest).

>   %pre guest-additions
>  +if [ $(systemd-detect-virt | grep -iP "oracle|kvm" -c) -eq 0 ]; then
>  +echo "This package it is only to install in one Oracle VM VirtualBox."
>  +echo "You are trying install VirtualBox guest-additions but it hasn't been \
>  +detected that your system is running in a VirtualBox virtualization, so we \
>  +forced the installation to fail."
>  +exit 1
>  +fi 
This won't work because you often prepare guest images on a system
other than the final hypervisor.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch
http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 05-01-18 15:03, Sérgio Basto wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  On Thu, 2018-01-04 at 14:16 +0100, Jan Kurik wrote:
> > - Add VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list
> > for the Workstation product
>  
>  I don't understand this one, VirtualBox Guest should *only* be
>  installed in an virtual machine . 
But it is impossible to determine ahead of time if e.g. a
Fedora Workstation Live image is going to get booted as a
VirtualBox guest or in some other way. As others have reported,
we do the same thing for the guest tools for all other hypervisors.

>  Today VirtualBox-server conflicts with VirtualBox-guest-additions
> and
>  vice versa . 
I don't know why this used to be done, but this simply will no longer
be necessary going forward. There are going to be 2 kernel modules
named vboxguest.ko and vboxsf.ko as part of the main kernel-modules
package, which will have no symbols which in any way will conflict with
the out of tree vbox host kernel modules and the VirtualBox-guest-additions
package itself (which will not contain any kernel modules) will contain
this:

[hans@shalem master]$ rpm -qlp x86_64/VirtualBox-guest-additions-5.2.2-1.fc27.x86_64.rpm
VirtualBox-guest-additions-5.2.2-1.fc27.x86_64
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/98vboxadd-xclient.sh
/etc/xdg/autostart/vboxclient.desktop
/usr/bin/VBoxClient
/usr/bin/VBoxClient-all
/usr/bin/VBoxControl
<snip buildid stuff>
/usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxservice.service
/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-vboxguest.rules
/usr/lib64/security/pam_vbox.so
/usr/sbin/VBoxService
/usr/sbin/mount.vboxsf
/usr/share/licenses/VirtualBox-guest-additions
/usr/share/licenses/VirtualBox-guest-additions/COPYING
/usr/share/licenses/VirtualBox-guest-additions/COPYING.CDDL

ConditionVirtualization=|oracle

So the service will only run under vbox. As for the file size,
the installed size is all of 3308559 bytes.

>  I also propose the patch attach, to don't let install
> VirtualBox-guest-
>  additions in host systems, at the time could break the Xorg graphics
>  and all windows managers .
>  Furthermore at least is just a waste of disk space, for non virtual
>  machines and for who don't use VirtualBox. 
As others have already explained this is a bad idea.

Regards,

Hans