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

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 09-06-17 12:07, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 09, 2017 at 11:58:31AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> This commit adds the vboxvideo drm/kms driver for the virtual graphics
>> card used in Virtual Box virtual machines to drivers/staging.
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Last time I looked, the user/kernel api was a horrid C++ structure mess,
> and I couldn't tease apart the needed pieces to get everything to even
> build properly.  I'm glad to see this go in, but is that userspace api
> going to stay solid?  What happens when we find bugs (and odds are,
> there are lots of them) with that api?

Note this submission is not the vboxguest driver, which has its own
API (that is next on my todo list) this is just the drm/kms driver which
only uses the standard drm/kms interfaces to userspace and nothing virtual
box specific AFAIK.

Sorry if I caused confusion with my:

"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."

paragraph in the cover letter, that mostly applies to the vboxguest
driver, which still needs a lot of work before I consider it even
ready for staging.

I guess that means I will get to answer your questions from above when I
submit the vboxguest driver. All I can say for now is that we will need to
deal with any userspace ABI bugs in case by case manner, while trying to
maintain backward compatibility wherever possible.

> Can I get some signed-off-by from teh virtual box developers here that
> they are ok with this work happening?

Michael, can you reply with your S-o-b please ?

Regards,

Hans