[PATCH 0/1] staging: vboxvideo: Add vboxvideo to drivers/staging

[Hans de Goede]

Hi All,

Recently I've been working on cleaning up the vboxvideo driver with the
intend of mainlining it. For more background info also see:

http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/17743.html

Up until now this has never been done because of userspace ABI stability
concerns surrounding the guest drivers. I've been talking to VirtualBox
upstream about mainlining the guest drivers and VirtualBox upstream has
agreed to consider the userspace ABI stable and only extend it in a backwards
compatible manner.

Why drivers/staging? This driver is already being patched into the kernel
by several distros, thus it is good to get this driver upstream soon, so
that work on the driver can be easily shared.

At the same time we want to take our time to get this driver properly
cleaned up before submitting it as a normal driver under drivers/gpu/drm,
putting this driver in staging for now allows both.

Note this driver has already been significantly cleaned up, when I started
working on this the files under /usr/src/vboxguest/vboxvideo as installed
by Virtual Box 5.1.18 Guest Additions had a total linecount of 52681
lines. The version in this commit has 7275 lines.

Of those 7275 lines 3980 lines are in an osindependent directory which
contains portable code which is shared with other guest platforms such as
C-structure definitions for the virtual graphics card protocol and helper
functions for using these structures to communicate with the card. Since
these files are shared they are in the standard Virtual Box upstream code
style and not in the kernel coding style. All files outside of the
osindependent directory fully adhere to the kernel coding style.

Regards,

Hans