MRE request: virtualbox

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hello Christopher thanks for the huge work!


>Sorry for the delay in addressing this.

No need to be sorry at all, we are all under high work load, and I appreciate you all taking the steps to finally solve this long
standing issue. Let's try to finish it! :)

>This does seem like Virtualbox fits well enough in the HWE category (and 
>probably has sufficient upstream testing) for special SRU treatment.
>
>I've taken the liberty of reworking the wiki page 
>https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VirtualboxUpdates to make it easy to review and 
>accept Virtualbox SRU bugs. I've done this to the best of my 
>understanding, but you're the domain expert, so please check my work :)

If you didn't understand something, it means I wasn't clear enough, so thanks
for adding another pair of eyes

>Particularly: it's my understanding that this does *not* require any 
>special coordination with the kernel - the Ubuntu kernel contains 
>Virtualbox guest driver modules, but these are upstream kernel modules, 
>and the Ubuntu kernel build does not build virtualbox-dkms modules at 
>kernel-build time¹

Yes and no.
Virtualbox ships both host and guest dkms modules. People might want to install
guest-dkms even if they are provided by the kernel (they shuld have an higher priority)

Reasons might be multiple, bugs in upstream dkms module, or better behaviour.
I don't recall having issues with upstream guest dkms modules, but I didn't want
to drop it because of older kernels being still around, and for safety reasons.

For *host* kernel module this is sadly a little bit trickier. Newer kernel might
break vboxdrv.ko buildability, so for each new kernel, the dkms autopkgtests
should be looked at carefully for regressions (in both host and guest).


>I've also marked a couple of places (with *******s) where the test case 
>instructions were not clear to me. The intent with test case 
>documentation is that it should be detailed enough that anyone reading 
>the bug could perform the steps and we could be confident that they have 
>exercised the expected tests.

I fully agree and sorry for not being clear enough, I do this testing in an automatic
way on my head, so I'm pretty sure I missed lots of things.

>Specifically, the questions I had were:
>
>* instructions for installing/removing the guest additions from the iso 
>pack (or pointers to documentation for that)
>
>* What the “various other tests” are - you mention changing 
>configuration and vboxmanage?
>
>* Do we need to verify that installing virtualbox guest packages 
>*outside* a VM does not interfere with the system? There seems to have 
>been at least one bug raised about that in the past.

I don't recall such issues, but in any case didn't have such reports in the last like 5-10 years...
I'll add it in case, just to be extra safe.

>Sorry again for the delay,

Sorry again from my side for not putting the page in a clear enough way, it would have made things easier for
all of us :)

Feel free to have another look, the page will be updated in some minutes.

Gianfranco