Hello Lonnie,
I was just wondering if there was an estimate on when the next release might happen as I am looking forward to seeing it as well as wondering if the current VirtualBox implementation in Genode will have been improved with networking and perhaps a local filesystem (for physical CDROM access or VDI acsess) so that you do not have to compile the guest OS ISO's into a Genode-NOVA-VB ISO to boot?
the next release (version 14.05) will be published end of May. We plan to have guest-networking support by summer. I cannot promise that the feature will become part of 14.05 already.
Btw, with the current version of VirtualBox, you don't need to load the VDI/ISO images as boot modules. You can already store them on a regular file system on disk.
VirtualBox always requests a file-system session and obtains the VDI or ISO file from there. It's just that our example run script routes the file-system session request to a ram_fs, which, in turn, obtains the VDI file from core's ROM service. You can replace the ram_fs with a real file system (e.g., ext2_fuse_fs) working on a block device (e.g., via ahci_drv).
Cheers Norman