[OmniOS-discuss] VirtualBox 5.1 - Missing dependencies

[Dale Ghent]

> On Mar 29, 2017, at 5:00 PM, Volker A. Brandt <vab at bb-c.de> wrote:
> 
> Dan McDonald writes:
>> Ideally someone would package it on OmniOS itself for OmniOS.
> 
> Would that be permitted by the VirtualBox license?  Shouldn't be too
> hard if it is just repackaging...

Preferably it would also be natively built. One of the unfortunate legacy aspects is that VirtualBox’s notion of “SunOS” is Oracle Solaris and stays absolutely true to that expectation. This was certainly an issue with the vbox add-ons and the vboxfs driver no longer building or working on illumos, as it was expecting symbols that were introduced in later versions of Oracle Solaris 11 but are not present in illumos, which still self-identifies as the same.

As time progresses, these kinds of differences will only widen, especially as there will be no Solaris 12, whereupon the differences between illumos and Oracle Solaris 11 would at least stop widening. Once the Oracle Solaris virtualbox binaries start expecting a library that we don’t ship, or either Oracle or us change the behavior of some call or the like, things start breaking rapidly and running it on illumos ceases to be an option.

It is conceivable, however, that a patch set could be maintained by someone with the time and interest which could make vbox buildable and runnable on illumos-based OSes such as OmniOS or OI.

/dale
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