Tails

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2017-01-02 23:35:11

It’s unlikely that VirtualBox is released in Stretch (or in any future Debian release, until Oracle fixes their policy wrt. security vulns). It’s also unclear whether it’ll be in backports (those are for packages that are in testing, and what’s in testing is meant to be for next stable).

So, what we have here is a superset of what I’ve started a discussion about on Feature #12104. While Feature #12104 is only about the kernel modules, this ticket is also about the guest additions. What’s broken with a Tails VirtualBox guest that has neither the guest additions nor the kernel modules? Help is welcome.

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2017-01-30 14:18:51

What should be tested:

• X screen resolution:
  • what’s the one automatically configured on boot?
  • can one manually change that resolution using the GNOME Display settings?
  • does resizing the window (on the host) trigger adjustements to the screen resolution (in the guest)?
• mouse pointer & keyboard (switching between host & guest)
• clipboard sharing
• shared folders

I assume none of that will work, but I’m curious how bad it is, especially the bits about screen resolution.

#8 Updated by anonym 2017-01-30 17:15:59

intrigeri wrote:
> What should be tested:
>
> * X screen resolution:
> what’s the one automatically configured on boot?
> can one manually change that resolution using the GNOME Display settings?
> does resizing the window (on the host) trigger adjustements to the screen resolution (in the guest)?
> * mouse pointer & keyboard (switching between host & guest)
> * clipboard sharing
> * shared folders
>
> I assume none of that will work, but I’m curious how bad it is, especially the bits about screen resolution.

As I have reported elsewhere (e.g. Feature #12104#note-5) all we should lose by dropping the guest modules are:

• clipboard sharing
• shared folders
• host-to-guest time syncing
• (more stuff we never cared about, like running exec (yes, it has a built-in remote shell :))

#9 Updated by intrigeri 2017-01-30 17:57:01

> As I have reported elsewhere (e.g. Feature #12104#note-5) all we should lose by dropping the guest modules are:

Note that this ticket is not only about the guest modules. It’s about the userspace utilities + kernel modules.

#11 Updated by anonym 2017-01-30 19:16:22

I can fonfirm Dr_Whax’s results. However, I know realized that this branch removes virtualbox-guest-{utils,x11}. I thought it was only about removing the kernel modules (and the DKMS mess we’ve had to deal with regularly), so that was what my comment above was about.

So, the vesa driver is supposed to work, but it rarely does because either VirtualBox or Xorg introduces some incompatibility. So, if we want to support VirtualBox, I’m afraid we’ll need at least virtualbox-guest-x11.

#13 Updated by intrigeri 2017-01-30 19:36:40

Now, I wonder if it’s better to break VirtualBox support early (in 3.0) with proper warnings, early communication, pointers to alternatives, rather than breaking it later (in 3.x) without much early notice. I’ll leave this ticket closed for now, but wouldn’t mind feedback on this from our UX people. Take into account that it might be that we never have to break it later.

#15 Updated by intrigeri 2017-07-27 07:19:50

FWIW the vboxvideo driver made it into the staging section of Linux 4.13-rc2. But I guess that only replaces bits of the DKMS stuff, and the usespace X.Org video driver is still needed (I didn’t check though).