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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.
Just had a look at their site. Interesting that they claim contradictory things. Mainly that state that the source is the 'complete' program but also that their closed binaries have additional features. No .rpm or .spec in the source so I didn't bother to download it yet, certainly sounds like at least having a look at, heck maybe I could contribute a .spec at least. Of course I'll probably have to use a VM to do it because they don't have a stable 64bit host yet. :(
/. actually used it already and can testify that it runs at good speed and doesn't crap itself every ten minutes?
Before doing anything though, is this for real? Has anyone on
Democrat delenda est
My God. We have: Xen, KVM, VMWare, QEMU (with and without KQEMU), User Mode Linux, Win4Lin, Bochs, and now VirtualBox. I'm sure there's others I've missed too.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So these guys look like they're targeting desktop use for the most part. So the big thing several players in the commercial space are rushing towards is support for 3D graphics acceleration via the graphics card. VMWare and Parallels are both due to release something usable in the near future. I see nothing about it on their Web site or in the user guide. It seems a strange item to leave out.
If the license were unconcionable (as are most proprietary software licenses), then it could possibly hurt. You could expose yourself to liability, or tainting. However, the licenses for the propietary-included and free-only versions are both blissfully simple and reasonable. Kudos to Innotek.
-josh
From the perspective of running windows virtualised in linux;
Xen is a pain to setup and manage for a desktop, it's server-orientated. QEMU without KQEMU is dead slow (full virtualisation has its price!), with KQEMU is closed source. KVM is quick with VT processors, but suffers from poor USB support (locks up on my machine), and network performance is slow in both due to lack of paravirtualised network drivers in qemu. UML obviously doesn't run windows. Win4Lin I haven't tried, it isn't free in either sense. Bochs is for much more hardcore situations than running Windows on x86. VMWare on linux - for me - has been awkward to get working fully (USB again) and rather flakey on both gentoo and ubuntu.
Currently KVM shows promise, but it needs a bit more work for me, especially for USB, vesa-resolutions and networking. No doubt in another 6 months, it will be awesome. Indidivual user VMWare software just seems happier running with windows as the host OS.
So far, my testing of virtualbox looks very promising - very fast, VERY nice front end on linux, quick to setup, and the closed source version has some clever RDP features. I think I may finally have found a virtualisation software that lets me sync my PDA to outlook via USB, when running linux as my main OS - my holy grail.
There are lots of different virtualisation projects from total emulators like bochs, to paravirtualised-optimised systems like virtualbox and vmware, to full virtualisation such as qemu and kvm (strictly speaking, kvm is a replacement for kqemu, not qemu itself). I've not heard of virtualbox before, but I'm certainly going to look further into it.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.