[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] virtualbox moved to contrib

[Frank Mehnert]

Hi,

On Saturday 18 May 2013 22:03:08 Felix Geyer wrote:
> 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.

EFI in VirtualBox has definitely not the same level of stability as the
normal BIOS. I would strongly discourage from publishing an EFI-only
VirtualBox package.

> - 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.

Kind regards,

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