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Virtualbox Goes OSS
paltemalte writes to tell us that VirtualBox has gone open source. InnoTek released their virtualization product as open source and launched virtualbox.org to help cultivate the community and allow further development of the software.
That's a little unfair. That list represents a wide range of technologies out there, from full virtualization to full emulation, of complete OSes or particular software, and with a spot of OS porting and machine language translation on the side.
Which you use depends on what you want to do - if you're in hosting, Xen, KVM, VMWare, vservers or OpenVZ is probably what you're after. If you're wanting to test software on several OSes, VMWare is probably where it's at, though Xen and probably KVM will serve too. If your OS of choice doesn't run on your hardware, you'll need an emulator like QEmu. Kernel hackers will probably use UML, Qemu or Bochs, whereas those who wish to use windows apps under linux might try Xen, KVM, QEmu, VMWare, Wine, Win4Lin or Cedega depending on various factors.
Various levels of hardware support are also represented. Xen will get you near-native performance, but you'll need an x86 that explicitly supports full virtualization or an OS that's been recompiled for paravirtualization. QEmu, on the other hand, will let you run windows on a powerpc mac, albeit more slowly.
So, although there's a lot of choice out there, which one you'd actually use depends a lot on what hardware you've got, what OS or progam you want to run, whether you want to use Office, play games, run a variety of OSes or many instances of one, and what's the fastest technique for your particular combination. There's a lot going on, and it's not just about running windows under linux or vice versa.
I have to admit I hadn't heard of this before, so I thought I'd give a go (with the XP binary download).
Bloody hell! It not only seems to work, it looks pretty fast as well. I'm installing a Fedora 6 on it (hosted on Win XP) as I type. I use VMware (licenced) on other systems and I use VMWare Player on this one (Dell XP thingy) and, so far, VB has impressed me.
The user interface seems to be better thought out than I've encountered in the past (I especially like the ability to blow a virtual machine completely away with little effort) - VMWare, take note.
I'll post again when I've given this instance a bit of a hammering - you know; IP stack handling, cpu loading etc.
Give it a try - it can't hurt. AND their site hasn't shown signs of being slashdotted (err... yet).
Oh, yeah! One last thing. Will those who are whinging about the differences about the binary version and the source version please do two things:
1. Read what they *actually* say about the two versions.
2. STFU!!
I thank you.
Those effects are pre-rendered. That window isn't movable.
Here is a company releasing a virtualization program, all of the sudden and then read all the first 20-30 posts - what a disgrace, complaints about licenses they haven't even read or understood, complaints that "redistribution" via bittorrent - guys, what are you doing?
/. crowd become . . .
This is a 270M large source package, have you even took the time SVN it? No! So you all prematurely replying about something you have little to no clue about - educate yourself!
Man, you are a disgrace of OSS movement, every single one who has posted so early complaining this or that without indepth study what they actually have to offer the OSS movement.
Years ago you would have praised them for the move, studied the code, and then started to praise, curse or criticize and eventually also contribute. How arrogant has
Anway, enough ranting - I currently try to get it compiled under freebsd.x86 . . .
Tehre is a german review:
http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/83678/
As they say it seems to be quite promissing.
Innotek is an interesting company, one of the last OS/2 venders who have done quite a bit for OS/2. Products include
Porting Virtual PC to OS/2 before MS bought it out (and fixes so virtual PC runs OS/2)
Porting Alsa to OS/2. GPL questions about not releasing the 16 bit interface which the community rewrote and now we have the opensource Uniaud. Sound actually works better here then under Ubuntu.
Lots of work on Odin (think Wine from which much of the code comes from). Unluckily they closed of most of their later developments and there has been questions about whether they are breaking the GPL. Seems they have honoured the letter of the GPL but perhaps not the spirit.
Using Odin ported
Flash 5 (plus an illegal Flash 7 sneaked into the wild)
Java 1.4
Acrobat reader.
Also one of there most important developments (now maintained by the main porter) GCC 3.2.2 along with a new Libc as IBM would not distribute GPL code to build Mozilla.
This allows the Mozilla family to continue to run on OS/2 and many an open source program to build with configure and make.
Innotek libc is now klibc using GCC 3.3.5 and continues to improve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
With VirtualBox a technologically mature virtualization software for Windows and Linux enters the ring and it has a lot to offer: stability, performance, use both as workstation and server, lots of supported guest systems, and a many niceties that make the use of virtual machines comfortable -- and all this as open source. Weaknesses only occur only appear with advanced function for server consolidation. Vmware, VirtualPC, and others better watch out.