VirtualBox Guest Driver Being Mainlined With Linux 4.16

The upcoming Linux 4.16 kernel cycle will be mainlining the VirtualBox Guest "vboxguest" kernel driver.

As part of an effort led by Red Hat, the VirtualBox guest drivers are finally working towards mainline in the Linux kernel and with 4.16 there is the vboxguest driver as a notable step following the VirtualBox DRM/KMS driver in Linux 4.13.

The VirtualBox Guest driver is needed for supporting features like copy-and-paste to/from the VM, VirtualBox Seamless mode, and also necessary for OpenGL pass-through and other functionality.

This couple thousand lines of vboxguest kernel code was added to char-misc-next for pulling in turn with Linux 4.16.

The next step for Red Hat's Hans de Goede is landing the "vboxsf" driver for VirtualBox guest shared folder support. The shared folder driver depends upon vboxguest and the patches for review are now on the mailing list but likely will be too late for getting into Linux 4.16.