Linux 6.14 To Allow VirtualBox Guest Support On ARM64 VMs

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 20 January 2025 at 08:48 AM EST. 2 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
The Linux 6.14 kernel will enable the VirtualBox guest drivers to be built for ARM64 Linux virtual machines (VMs).

Coming in as part of the VFS misc pull request for Linux 6.14 is enabling initial VirtualBox guest support on ARM64. This amounts to a Kconfig update for allowing the VirtualBox guest driver support to be built for ARM64 rather than being limited to x86/x86_64 kernels.

This change comes now that Oracle VM VirtualBox is beginning to run on ARM64 hosts such as the Apple M3/M4 devices. With the actual ARM64 VirtualBox hypervisor support materializing, the upstream guest kernel drivers should also now be allowed to build for ARM64 kernels.

VirtualBox on Linux


The change allows for Linux kernel builds to enable the "VBOXGUEST" option on ARM64 for the VirtualBox guest integration support and also allow enabling "VBOXSF_FS" for the shared folder integration between hosts and guests.

The VirtualBox guest ARM64 Linux support was tested by using an Apple MacBook Pro running the latest VirtualBox upstream software with the Linux guest VM.

This support was submitted for Linux 6.14 as part of the VFS misc pull request.
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