VirtualBox ships with "alternative BIOS sources" for its virtual BIOS.
These are generated by first compiling the BIOS C sources with the
Open Watcom toolchain, disassembling the output and checking in the
disassembly into the VirtualBox repo.
The result means that the BIOS C code cannot be patched, because it's
not compiled from the C sources, if Open Watcom is not there.
As Open Watcom is now available in nixpkgs, we can just ignore the
alternative BIOS sources and compile it from C directly.
Update Virtualbox to its latest version. This allows compilation against
kernel >= 5.4 to succeed without further patches (see #74260, build
would fail for linux-5.5.5 to 5.5.9).
Newer `iasl`-versions disallow strings within certain declarations[1]
which breaks the virtualbox build as it relies on exactly this
behavior[2].
This should be removed again when updating virtualbox to 6.1.
[1] https://acpica.org/node/172
[2] https://hydra.nixos.org/build/108774352
Quoting from the splitString docstring:
NOTE: this function is not performant and should never be used.
This replaces trivial uses of splitString for splitting version
strings with the (potentially builtin) splitVersion.
These don't use a the virtualbox sources, but an iso as src, and we need
to add the kernel 5.3 patch aswell.
As for some reason the source files are present on the .iso with Windows
Line endings (sic!), call dos2unix first.
Unfortunately, we can't use the same kernel-5.3-fix.patch as virtualbox
itself, as some files are missing and paths are different.
It seems to be broken upstream too, and fixing it is far down the
priority list:
https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/2017-June/014561.html
Additionally, 3d support seems to rely on VBoxOGL.so being symlinked
from libGL.so (which we can't), and Oracle doesn't plan on supporting
libglvnd either. (#18457)
Quite some fixing was needed to get this to work.
Changes in VirtualBox and additions:
- VirtualBox is no longer officially supported on 32-bit hosts so i686-linux is removed from platforms
for VirtualBox and the extension pack. 32-bit additions still work.
- There was a refactoring of kernel module makefiles and two resulting bugs affected us which had to be patched.
These bugs were reported to the bug tracker (see comments near patches).
- The Qt5X11Extras makefile patch broke. Fixed it to apply again, making the libraries logic simpler
and more correct (it just uses a different base path instead of always linking to Qt5X11Extras).
- Added a patch to remove "test1" and "test2" kernel messages due to forgotten debugging code.
- virtualbox-host NixOS module: the VirtualBoxVM executable should be setuid not VirtualBox.
This matches how the official installer sets it up.
- Additions: replaced a for loop for installing kernel modules with just a "make install",
which seems to work without any of the things done in the previous code.
- Additions: The package defined buildCommand which resulted in phases not running, including RUNPATH
stripping in fixupPhase, and installPhase was defined which was not even run. Fixed this by
refactoring using phases. Had to set dontStrip otherwise binaries were broken by stripping.
The libdbus path had to be added later in fixupPhase because it is used via dlopen not directly linked.
- Additions: Added zlib and libc to patchelf, otherwise runtime library errors result from some binaries.
For some reason the missing libc only manifested itself for mount.vboxsf when included in the initrd.
Changes in nixos/tests/virtualbox:
- Update the simple-gui test to send the right keys to start the VM. With VirtualBox 5
it was enough to just send "return", but with 6 the Tools thing may be selected by
default. Send "home" to reliably select Tools, "down" to move to the VM and "return"
to start it.
- Disable the VirtualBox UART by default because it causes a crash due to a regression
in VirtualBox (specific to software virtualization and serial port usage). It can
still be enabled using an option but there is an assert that KVM nested virtualization
is enabled, which works around the problem (see below).
- Add an option to enable nested KVM virtualization, allowing VirtualBox to use hardware
virtualization. This works around the UART problem and also allows using 64-bit
guests, but requires a kernel module parameter.
- Add an option to run 64-bit guests. Tested that the tests pass with that. As mentioned
this requires KVM nested virtualization.
It does not work if the sha256 is not hex, it fails because VBoxExtPackHelperApp requires to be given a hex hash.
See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/34846 where the same problem was fixed some time ago.
