Starting with version 1.4, VirtualBox provided support for virtual
serial ports, which, at the time, was rather complicated to set up with a
sequence of VBoxManage setextradata
statements. Since version 1.5, that way of setting up serial ports is no
longer necessary and deprecated. To set up virtual
serial ports, use the methods now described in Section 3.10, “Serial ports”.
Note
For backwards compatibility, the old
setextradata statements, whose
description is retained below from the old version of the manual, take
precedence over the new way of configuring serial
ports. As a result, if configuring serial ports the new way doesn't
work, make sure the VM in question does not have old configuration
data such as below still active.
The old sequence of configuring a serial port used the following 6 commands:
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/Config/IRQ" 4
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/Config/IOBase" 0x3f8
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/LUN#0/Driver" Char
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/LUN#0/AttachedDriver/Driver" NamedPipe
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/LUN#0/AttachedDriver/Config/Location" "\\.\pipe\vboxCOM1"
VBoxManage setextradata "VM name"
"VBoxInternal/Devices/serial/0/LUN#0/AttachedDriver/Config/IsServer" 1
This sets up a serial port in the guest with the default settings
for COM1 (IRQ 4, I/O address 0x3f8) and the
Location setting assumes that this
configuration is used on a Windows host, because the Windows named pipe
syntax is used. Keep in mind that on Windows hosts a named pipe must
always start with \\.\pipe\. On Linux the
same configuration settings apply, except that the path name for the
Location can be chosen more freely. Local
domain sockets can be placed anywhere, provided the user running
VirtualBox has the permission to create a new file in the directory. The
final command above defines that VirtualBox acts as a server, i.e. it
creates the named pipe itself instead of connecting to an already existing
one.