Installing the Alternate Bridged Networking Driver on Oracle Solaris 11 Hosts

Oracle VM VirtualBox includes a network filter driver that utilizes Oracle Solaris 11's Crossbow functionality. By default, this new driver is installed for Oracle Solaris 11 hosts that have support for it.

To force installation of the older STREAMS based network filter driver, execute as root the following command before installing the Oracle VM VirtualBox package:

$ touch /etc/vboxinst_vboxflt

To force installation of the Crossbow based network filter driver, execute as root the following command before installing the Oracle VM VirtualBox package:

$ touch /etc/vboxinst_vboxbow

To check which driver is currently being used by Oracle VM VirtualBox, execute:

$ modinfo | grep vbox

If the output contains "vboxbow", it indicates Oracle VM VirtualBox is using the Crossbow network filter driver, while the name "vboxflt" indicates usage of the older STREAMS network filter.