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