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Review of Sun's Free Open Source Virtual Machine
goombah99 writes "After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Machine. It can host 32- or 64-bit Linux, Windows XP Vista and 98, OpenSolaris and DOS. It runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on MacWorld, showing HD movies playing inside windows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like its competition, it can run other OSes in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition earlier.
In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware, and coupled with the far less demanding system requirements (at least for the VM software itself, it doesn't do much to reduce guest sys requirements, of course :P), I haven't used VMware for over a year and half now.
Sun has consistently appeared to be one of the largest corporate supporters of OSS, and their hardware is rock solid, yet they seem to get bashed every time they come up. It seems like they've been busy giving away the keys to the castle so to speak, but it never seems to be enough. What does everybody have against Sun?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
"demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware"
what? i have been running vmware on my linux workstation at work for years and recently switched to virtualbox and realized that virtualbox is in orders of magnitude snappier, faster and less ressource-intensive than vmware.
just the fact that mouse support works absolutely flawless in vb is an enormous advantage over vmware. i am not even going into how much i/o wait vmware seemed to cause all the time which vb simply doesn't (yes the settings are comparable:>)
NEVER will i go back to vmware again (at least not on the desktop)
The binaries are not Free for corporate use. The source is free (GPL) but good fucking luck compiling it on a windows machine. Maybe you could compile it on a linux machine but on windows it assumes a development environment complete with every freakin' thing under the Sun (no pun intended). I gave up after two days of trying to get it to work.
:-)
Go recursive / self-hosted build. You could always set up a VirtualBox VM with the appropriate development environment to build VirtualBox
Does it emulate whatever Apple hardware OS X checks for, or will it still need a patched OS?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).
After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).
I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).
Does this thing run the VM as some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS or does it piggyback the other OS's on a parent OS.
If It's a hypervisor like thing where all the OS's' are symmetric then I guess it must be getting in the way of my "normal" OS and limiting it to single core?
If it's not a hypervisor/symmetric VM and one OS is the master, Do all the OS's have full access to the hardware functions. So for example if I my mac is the master OS, and I set up a firewall set, does the windows OS have to go through the mac's firewall (and thus be protected better) or does it have direct access to the ports itself. If the latter who negotiates the conflicts when both want the CD or audio port.
Finally, are the VMs portabel from machine to machine. Or even platform to platform.
So If I create a VM on one machine, save it's state and open it on another machine, does it just run? (even the network settings?) What if the second machine was say an AMD and the first an Intel. What if the first host was a mac and the second host a linux machine?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The parent poster is saying that the XP startup sequence, from the 3 bars that marquee to the login/desktop is a lot faster. Even Vista flies unnaturally under VirtualBox with only 512MB of RAM dedicated to it on an AM2 5000+ BE processor without hardware virtualization enabled.
I refuse to run Vista on a real machine--I've seen one too many horrifying installs with quality WHQL certified hardware go horribly wrong. I don't mind running Vista in VirtualBox, it behaves very well. The only snag I ran into was slow network performance caused by the default PCnet-FAST III network interface. I switched over to an Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop virtual NIC and it runs like a champ.
I can't emphasize enough how unbelievably VirtualBox performs. I can even run 2000 SP4, XP SP3, Vista SP1 and variety of Linux guests at the same time, and each one is snappy. Check it out if you haven't with the guest additions installed. I guarantee that you will be greatly surprised.
I'm curious as to how your experiences have been with 3d in other virtualization software. As of yesterday, I couldn't even get Counter-strike:Source to open in VMWare (which is hardly resource-intensive by today's standards), let alone play; my experiences in Parallels, while less recent, have been pretty much the same. I've of course tried several other games with similar results. Maybe their 3d goals are more CAD/workstation-oriented, but that's frankly irrelevant to me.
Anyone else with some insight?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I highly recommend swapping that around. I run a Vista guest on Ubuntu and it is really quick - for some reason the Vista boot time seems quicker in the VM (?) - and that gives me 3D acceleration for Ubuntu. It works out a bit better for me because the 3D desktop in Vista is pretty, but the 3D desktop on Ubuntu is highly functional and much more configurable. I'll take the form + function over just form any day.
It's also kinda cool running Vista in a root window and blowing peoples mind by doing regular windows stuff, then hitting some magic key combination to rotate a cube to a completely different system. Of course I have completely re-themed the Ubuntu system and installed emerald - rotating from vista to a turd invokes the wrong sort of "wow".
I don't therefore I'm not.
I'll take TUN/TAP over VMware's clusterfuck of an installation script any day.
Many of VirtualBox's error messages could be improved, but they are better than VMware's random freezing or empty dialog boxes.
I think you're a bit crazy to run a 64 bit kernel and 32 bit user space... it doesn't really matter if VirtualBox does or does not support this... Linux itself doesn't!
I am doing exactly the same, but the host OS is Solaris nevada-94. I made the Vista VM just 640MB (the host has 4GB) thinking it would be somewhat slow - actually is very good. And it still blows onlookers away in Seamless mode with the maxed out Compiz configuration on a modest Quadro FX570...
The laptop I am writing this from (using OpenSolaris snv-94) also had Vista running under VirtualBox (I needed the only-windows VPN client), but I took it off, as it seemed to overheat the system.
Got also OpenBSD running (4.4), but without X (not interesting in this case, ofcourse, but still...).
The main problem I'm having right now with it is NetBSD - staunchly refuses to boot under VirtualBox with a consistent error (posted to the relevant lists, but with no sensible answer so far).
One should not forget that VirtualBox place under the sun (pun intended) is mainly for development tests and casual use; it is not server class product, so it should not be mixed with the likes of VMWare server or Xem. If you are running a VM and decide to log out, you can't unless the guests have been suspended or shut down. Having said that, the performance is indeed very good and the guests are usable.
Other virtualization technologies from Sun include xVM - this is effectively Xen with the underlying Linux bits replaced with Solaris AFAIU. I've ran a few VMs with this, not regularly ATM; it seems to be getting better with every new Nevada point.
Because it's bullshit.
You cannot compile your own binary from the supposedly free open source code and distribute it. The goal here is to save money on QA by rolling patches made to the released open source code into their commecrcial non-distibutable binary product. This is the same crap that has me pissed off at Sugar (of SugarCRM). Sugar has done a very good job of FOOLING the open source community into thinking their product is open source. What Sugar does is that the release most of the product as open source, except for a few critical features, and they refuse to allow open source people to add those features. So they can have the benefits of open source (free QA, free development) without actually sharing freely with the public.
Essentially what Sun is trying to do here is STEAL the code of contributors.
You can compile Qt from source on Linux. The GPL is a perfectly fine license for it that inhibits no real-world use. That means that Qt is a great toolkit for Linux. It would be that even if it didn't run on Windows at all.
So I'm curious, what makes Qt worthy of special distinction that gives you pause?