[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] virtualbox moved to contrib

[Felix Geyer]

On 18.05.2013 20:04, Antonio Terceiro wrote:
>> However, Watcom is needed only for 16-bit code, and VirtualBox has an EFI
>> mode.  Would it be possible to restrict it to EFI only in main, unless the
>> BIOS from contrib is loaded?
> 
> If that's possible, I would ask the virtualbox maintainer(s) to please
> consider this alternative so that we can have virtualbox back in main.

There are a few problems with this:

- The EFI images aren't currently built from source as well. However it should
  be possible to do so (see [1]).
- I'm not sure how well VirtualBox is able to boot common operating system with
  EFI. I (and probably upstream) are already looking forward to heaps of
  "$OS doesn't boot" bug reports.
- It would require even more patching of VirtualBox to default to EFI and
  display a proper error message when you try to boot a VM in BIOS mode and
  it's not available.
- The VirtualBox maintainers (= me at the moment) don't even have time to
  properly maintain the VirtualBox package as it is. So someone else would
  have to join pkg-virtualbox and do the work.

Cheers,
Felix

[1]
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-virtualbox/virtualbox.git;a=blob;f=src/VBox/Devices/EFI/Firmware2/VBoxPkg/ReadMe.txt;hb=HEAD