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.

Comments

Mentions comparible speeds to VMware...

[Drinking Bleach]

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.

Re:Mentions comparible speeds to VMware...

[MightyMartian]

I had nothing but problems with it when I was testing it a couple of months ago. I couldn't get the networking to work in NAT mode, and bridging mode on a laptop ain't always the best idea. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Re:Mentions comparible speeds to VMware...

[adisakp]

In my experience, I've actually found VirtualBox to be much faster than VMware

VMWare supports multiple CPUs (2 cores visible on Guest OS) and also supports hardware accelerated 3D. Have you tried running any 3D or multithreaded apps under VMWare and VirtualBox? I find that VMWare is quite fast if you install the VMTools in the guest OS and the integration (cross VM copy/past / drag and drop, seamless mouse pointer, etc) is quite nice.

One of the main things I like about VMWare is the "Snapshot" capability which lets you create multiple "restore" points (in an easy to use visual "tree" manager) that you can instantly return to. In fact you can have a VM automatically revert to a snapshot. Does VirtualBox have any sort of advanced snapshot management?

Sun

[jcnnghm]

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?

Re:Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

The short answer is that Sun won't get on the Linux bandwagon.

The slightly longer answer is that they are actually trying to compete with Linux. And some people will even say that Solaris is, in some ways, better than Linux. That's apostasy of the highest order for the Slashdot crowd.

A longer answer still is that most people on Slashdot are probably exposed to the worst of Sun as part of their jobs: the 10-year old behemoths. They haven't been updated in years (if ever). You can't buy parts for them, and even if you could, they're a bitch to work with because they weigh a million pounds. You spend a large part of your day just trying to keep them shuffling off this mortal coil for just a few more days. And you still often get calls about them in the middle of the night. Then you turn to your fellow admin, the guy who runs 100 shiny new Dells with RHEL5. Who has 100 times as many servers as you, but spends his entire day reading Slashdot. And you burn with hate for Solaris. It's not fair -- a 10-year old Linux box is going to be in a far worse state than a 10-year old Sun box -- but it is the way people think.

I guess the really short answer is: "A lot of reasons, none of them very good."

Re:Sun

[MobyTurbo]

For example, we know the main reason why Apple went on an open-sourcing binge when OS X was released, to keep Apple relevant, but Sun never really had a down time like Apple did around the OS 9 era.

The main reason why OS X has so much open source has nothing to do with "an attempt to keep Apple relevant", it was because when NeXTStep (OS X's ancestor, why do you think most of the API still begins with NS?) was made, Unixes that were based on BSD Unix were the de-facto standard, and the Mach microkernel was considered state of the art. There were a *lot* of Unixes that were partially open source (though this predates the open source movement) and partially proprietary at the time. OS X simply has heritage from a codebase that was state of the art Unix circa the late 80s. (Predating Linux by several years.)

Re:Sun

[Zancarius]

I've been reading the Sun ceo's blog lately, and it seems like every post talks about open source at some point or another.

I have to agree. Jonathan Schwartz is a very brilliant individual, and his blog entries make for informative and often entertaining reads. His take on applying FOSS in the corporate world is very interesting, particularly in these times where the technological world seems to be moving away from proprietary software.

I very much believe that part of the reason Schwartz is so vehement about open sourcing Sun's offerings is partially the result of genuine goodwill. However, I also believe that much of the reason is due in no small part to his desire to a) keep Sun relevant in the news (it works to get headlines!), b) when he mentions Sun's GPL/OSI-approved software, he tends to also press the issues of maintainability, dependability, and Sun's commitment to continued support (i.e. it's open source and we can fix it if something goes wrong), and c) I think it may also be partially viral. One merely has to take a glance at the various languages (especially in the web development/scripting sphere) to understand how open sourcing the interpreter, virtual machine, or compiler tends to bolster a product's popularity. Yes, there are certainly failures in this regard, but considering Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, LUA, and company (let's not forget the popularity of gcc when it comes to C/C++!), the only thing that surprises me is that Sun didn't open source Java sooner.

Schwartz is a good man, and I'd like to believe that while he's looking out for maintaining Sun's relevance in the years ahead as well as pushing their own product offerings and support, he's also doing good for the community as a whole. As other posters stated before, it's really a moot point getting on Sun's case; there are serious, often frightening legal implications when you open up your source--especially if you licensed parts of it from other companies. It isn't that Sun wishes to do anything evil, it's just that their hands are tied by companies that don't exactly see the world in the same light as the rest of us do (remember the fiasco regarding Java's sound libraries and the Dolby or THX issues? that's a good example).

Bravo to Sun. VirtualBox is an awesome product, and I'm glad that they've added it to their product portfolio.

performace

[brezel]

"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)

Re:Binaries not Free

[adisakp]

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 :-)

But will it run OS X?

[Mr2001]

Does it emulate whatever Apple hardware OS X checks for, or will it still need a patched OS?

It get's even better - the source *won't* compile

[JSBiff]

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 ).

so what kind of VM is this

[goombah99]

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?