Interaction between g-s-d RandR component and VirtualBox Guest Additions

[Michael Thayer <michael thayer oracle com>]

Hello All,

I was wanting to ask for some advise related to gnome-settings-daemon,
and specifically the RandR component.  I am one of the developers from
the VirtualBox team at Oracle and mostly responsible for integration
with X11/X.Org in guest systems.  The background here is that VirtualBox
has a feature which dynamically adjusts the size of a guest system's
desktop when the user resizes the VirtualBox window on the host system.
Under the hood this is done by a tool running on the guest system which
is notified of the change and pokes the guest video driver.  The guest
video driver then changes its RandR mode list so that its preferred
resolution is the new host window size and the tool switches to that
resolution.

This works well until the user uses gnome-display-properties to select a
resolution.  After this it seems that g-s-d tries to take over
responsibility for screen resolutions, and the result is not very
pretty.  So my question is, how can we adjust the behaviour of the
VirtualBox Guest Additions in order to play better with g-s-d?  Bear in
mind that we also want the Additions to work in older Linux
distributions which are no longer receiving updates, so this includes
legacy versions of g-s-d too.

Thanks in advance.

Michael
-- 
ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG   Michael Thayer
Werkstrasse 24                     VirtualBox engineer
71384 Weinstadt, Germany           mailto:michael thayer oracle com

Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München
Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603

Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V.
Rijnzathe 6, 3454PV De Meern, Niederlande
Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697
Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz, Marcel van de Molen, Alexander van der Ven